<div dir="ltr">Hi Joe<div><br></div><div>Not really in direct answer to your question but you raise a really interesting point that we all rub against when both teaching and describing languages with complex morphology,</div><div><br></div><div>Sacha Beniamine (Surrey) and I have a paper under review discussing this and related problems in the context of morphological theory and typology. It's what people have called 'The Segmentation Problem' (Manning 1998; Beniamine & Naranjo 2021); basically while linguists can be trained to do segmentation, there is no single algorithm that a linguist or a computer can apply to the segmentation of words into component morphs to produce a consistent output that also aligns with how linguists traditionally think about these things. Andy Spencer (2012, p.92) has talked about this, he says: “when we look
at the practice of grammarians, it should be clear from a cursory glance through descriptions of familiar morphologically complex languages that there is no consensus
on segmentation even for extremely well-studied languages.”</div><div><br></div><div>The Nida example provided by Christian is really still the best version out there but it can't be formalised in an explicit way but I have also found it very useful for teaching. I think it's a really fascinating problem.</div><div><br></div><div>I also think this makes sense. Descriptive linguists, myself included, like to use the concept of morphemes when writing grammars because they are intuitive, useful and we all learn them but they are a theoretical notion, i.e. a minimal pairing of form and meaning. But so much of morphological typology has shown that below the word level (and above in many cases) the alignment of meaning and form is rarely so neat or isomorphic. Further, many, if not most, morphological theories either eschew the notion or use a very specific definition that doesn't really correspond to the traditional definition most of us were trained to think about. </div><div><br></div><div>Anyway, just some thoughts on the topic. <br><br>Best<br>Mae<br><br>Beniamine, S. and M. Guzmán Naranjo. 2021. Multiple alignments of inflectional
paradigms. Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 4(21) .<br><br>Manning, C.D. 1998. The segmentation problem in morphology learning. In Proceedings of the Joint Conferences on New Methods in Language Processing and
Computational Natural Language Learning, NeMLaP3/CoNLL ’98, Stroudsburg,
PA, USA, pp. 299–305. Association for Computational Linguistics.</div><div><br></div><div>Spencer, A. 2012. Identifying stems. Word Structure 5(1): 88–108</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><span style="border:0px;font-variant-numeric:inherit;font-variant-east-asian:inherit;font-variant-alternates:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;font-size:12pt;line-height:inherit;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size-adjust:inherit;font-kerning:inherit;font-feature-settings:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;color:rgb(0,0,0)">Dr Mae Carroll (she/her)</span><div style="border:0px;font-variant-numeric:inherit;font-variant-east-asian:inherit;font-variant-alternates:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;font-size:11pt;line-height:inherit;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size-adjust:inherit;font-kerning:inherit;font-feature-settings:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;color:rgb(0,0,0)">Lecturer in Linguistics</div><div style="border:0px;font-variant-numeric:inherit;font-variant-east-asian:inherit;font-variant-alternates:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;font-size:11pt;line-height:inherit;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size-adjust:inherit;font-kerning:inherit;font-feature-settings:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;color:rgb(0,0,0)">School of Languages and Linguistics</div><div style="border:0px;font-variant-numeric:inherit;font-variant-east-asian:inherit;font-variant-alternates:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;font-size:11pt;line-height:inherit;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size-adjust:inherit;font-kerning:inherit;font-feature-settings:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;color:rgb(0,0,0)">University of Melbourne</div><div style="border:0px;font-variant-numeric:inherit;font-variant-east-asian:inherit;font-variant-alternates:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;font-size:11pt;line-height:inherit;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size-adjust:inherit;font-kerning:inherit;font-feature-settings:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><a href="http://www.maecarroll.com/" title="www.maecarroll.com" style="border:0px;font:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline">www.maecarroll.com</a></div><div style="border:0px;font-variant-numeric:inherit;font-variant-east-asian:inherit;font-variant-alternates:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;font-size:12pt;line-height:inherit;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size-adjust:inherit;font-kerning:inherit;font-feature-settings:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div><div style="border:0px;font-variant-numeric:inherit;font-variant-east-asian:inherit;font-variant-alternates:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;font-size:medium;line-height:inherit;font-size-adjust:inherit;font-kerning:inherit;font-feature-settings:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><p style="margin:0cm 0px"><span style="border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;font-size:11pt;line-height:inherit;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;font-size-adjust:inherit;font-kerning:inherit;font-feature-settings:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;color:rgb(32,31,30)"><i>I acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land where I live and work, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations, and pay my respects to Elders past and present. I recognise that sovereignty was never ceded.</i></span></p></div><div style="border:0px;font-variant-numeric:inherit;font-variant-east-asian:inherit;font-variant-alternates:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;font-size:12pt;line-height:inherit;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size-adjust:inherit;font-kerning:inherit;font-feature-settings:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div></div><div><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at 10:56 PM Zingler, Tim via Lingtyp <<a href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org">lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div class="msg3624381778661661700">
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<p>Dear Joe, dear all,</p>
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<p>Phillip Rogers and I have a paper coming out with LT any day now where we look at that issue for a worldwide sample of 25 languages and about 1,500 affixes. The bottom line is as follows: both types are usually monosyllabic, but when they are not, prefixes
tend to be sub-syllabic (i.e., vowelless) more often than suffixes, whose second-favorite option is disyllabic size. Those results are statistically significant. So in a way, both your guiding principles are correct.</p>
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Previous research on that issue, with compatible results, can be found in Bybee et al. (1990), in this volume:</div>
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<a href="https://benjamins.com/catalog/tsl.20?srsltid=AfmBOopGoDDksgrf9l02wZ41FuMVBL8d5wdfgVZ6EW_uOndXCFIWFl63" target="_blank">https://benjamins.com/catalog/tsl.20?srsltid=AfmBOopGoDDksgrf9l02wZ41FuMVBL8d5wdfgVZ6EW_uOndXCFIWFl63</a></div>
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Best,</div>
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Tim<br>
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<div id="m_4949563496317178455divRplyFwdMsg" dir="ltr"><font face="Calibri, sans-serif" color="#000000" style="font-size:11pt"><b>Von:</b> Lingtyp <<a href="mailto:lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org" target="_blank">lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org</a>> im Auftrag von Joe Blythe via Lingtyp <<a href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org" target="_blank">lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org</a>><br>
<b>Gesendet:</b> Sonntag, 20. Oktober 2024 07:22<br>
<b>An:</b> <a href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org" target="_blank">lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org</a><br>
<b>Betreff:</b> [Lingtyp] Explicating morpheme boundaries</font>
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<div><span style="font-family:Aptos,sans-serif;font-size:medium">Dear typologists,</span></div>
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I’d like some help please coming up with a better rule of thumb for explicating morpheme boundaries to students. I teach a third year undergraduate morphosyntax unit. When beginning with orthodox agglutinative morphology, I usually give my students a kind of
rule of thumb, that when presented with a particular problem set, they should generally allocate as much phonological material as possible to the root (or stem), and the remainder can be allocated to an affix. I don’t recall where I learned this, but it always
seemed to me the sensible thing to do. Whether it is justified I’m not so sure. There are however occasions when it seems sensible to ensure that an affix contains at least a vowel. Yet there are certainly some affixes that lack a nucleus (the examples I’m
thinking of are all suffixes). So rightly or wrongly, I have two guiding principles here that are pushing in opposite directions. And there are always a few students who get all the glosses correct but have carved the joints differently. These solutions look
odd to me but I struggle to explain why I find them unsatisfactory. Now for every language it is usually possible determine where to carve the joints, given enough data. But when presented with a small dataset for some random language (perhaps without even
a name), how should we explain why prefixes generally need vowels? Actually, is this last point even true? I feel these issues has probably been discussed somewhere at length. If so, can you point me to some relevant literature, as I’d like to provide some
advice that’s typologically grounded, not on what feels like the right thing to do. </p>
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All the best</p>
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Joe</p>
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<div><font color="#424242"><span style="font-size:13px"><b>Joe Blythe</b></span></font></div>
<div><font color="#424242"><span style="font-size:11px">Associate Professor </span></font><font color="#424242"><span style="font-size:11px">| </span></font><span style="color:rgb(66,66,66);font-size:11px">Department of Linguistics | </span><span style="color:rgb(66,66,66);font-size:11px">Macquarie University</span><font color="#424242"><span style="font-size:11px"> </span></font></div>
<div><font color="#424242"><span style="font-size:11px">Room 514, 12 Second Way, </span><span style="font-size:11px">North Ryde, NSW 2109, Australia</span></font></div>
<div><span style="font-family:Calibri,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:11px">Vice President (Conferences), Australian Linguistic Society</span><font color="#424242"><br style="font-size:11px">
<br style="font-size:11px">
</font><span style="font-size:11px"><font color="#424242"><a href="mailto:joe.blythe@mq.edu.au" target="_blank">joe.blythe@mq.edu.au</a> | </font> </span><font color="#0433ff" style="font-size:11px"><a href="https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/persons/joe-blythe" target="_blank">www</a></font></div>
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