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<DIV><FONT face=Arial>Dear all,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2> <FONT size=3> I have a proposal.
I suggest</FONT> <FONT size=3>a new term, which would be FUNCTEME.
</FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2> </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2> <FONT size=3><EM>
</EM>Trask's <EM>flag</EM>, used by him with respect to an interesting
phenomenon in Basque morphosyntax, is not bad, but besides the reserves
expressed by Wolfgang and others, and despite the good arguments presented by
Martin, <EM>flag </EM>does not say anything to linguists, for a simple reason:
it is a metaphor. Admittedly, this makes it quite free of any loaden past in
linguistic terminology, but it also makes it somewhat surprising (let alone that
even if it is true that we write as scientists for scientists, the term
<EM>flag</EM>, </FONT></FONT><FONT face=Arial>if a cultured reader who is not a
professional linguist comes across it, might give a strange idea of what we are
doing...).</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2> <FONT size=3>I
coin FUNCTEME in the following way: the suffix
<EM><STRONG>-</STRONG>eme</EM>, in the terminology of linguistics as well as in
that of other sciences, regularly refers to "a unit (often the smallest one) of
what the root says" (cf. <EM>phoneme, toneme, sememe</EM>, etc.). The root, in
<EM>funct-eme</EM>, says that the unit in question merely indicates
the function of the element (mostly a noun or noun phrase) that it
governs: Engl. <EM>for </EM>in <EM>for my friend </EM>indicates that <EM>my
friend </EM>is the benefactive complement of the predicate. It is obvious
that prepositions like <EM>for</EM> also have a meaning (and this is the main
reason why <EM>case </EM>was originally used by Fillmore 1968 in a semantic
acception), but <EM>functeme</EM> strictly refers to the syntactic role of
relators. Thus, <EM>functeme</EM> precisely says what relators are actually from
the morphological and syntactic point(s) of view: they are <U>units of function
marking.</U></FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><U><FONT face=Arial></FONT></U> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>Best<U>,</U></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><U><FONT face=Arial></FONT></U> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>Claude</FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>