Nobody's Perfect Dept.

[Beverly Flanigan]

But I suspect Murfin read somewhere "the smallest unit of meaning" and
interpreted "of meaning" as "significant/meaningful."  Misleading indeed,
but only because he confused morphemes (with their constituent allomorphs)
with phonemes (with their constituent allophones).

I'm sure all this is obvious to all but the lurkers who refuse to learn
something about basic linguistics.

At 12:42 PM 12/15/2006, you wrote:
>"The smallest significant unit in language" is also misleading. Since
>allophones constitute morphemes,  a "phone" is in a real sense smaller,
>and "significant" too, since you can't have a spoken language without phones.
>
>   Prof. Murfin has taught English and criticism at Yale.
>
>   For lurkers, a phoneme is the smallest contrastive notional unit of
> sound that may affect meaning in a given language.
>
>   JL
>
>
>"Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
>   ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
>Sender: American Dialect Society
>Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
>Subject: Re: Nobody's Perfect Dept.
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>On Dec 15, 2006, at 7:13 AM, Larry Horn wrote:
>
> >> >From a professional explication for undergraduates of cultural-
> >> theory terms:
> >>
> >> "Phoneme... A phoneme is the smallest significant unit in
> >> language; thus, both 'a" and 'an' are phonemes, but 'n' is not."
> >>
> >> --Ross C. Murfin, "Glossary of Theoretical and Critical Terms," in
> >> Daniel R. Schwarz, ed. _Joseph Conrad: The Secret Sharer...with
> >> Biographical and Historical Contexts...and Essays from Five
> >> Contemporary critical Perspectives_ (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997),
> >> p. 264.
> >>
> > Well, he got the -eme part right, anyway. Part credit.
>
>not even that. "a" and "an" are morphs, instances of a single
>morpheme. murfin seems to be missing the abstraction in the morpheme
>concept.
>
>ok, to be generous, you can read him as using "morpheme" to mean
>'instance of a morpheme'. so there are two morphemes in "an owl" and
>two in "a bird".
>
>in any case, the examples are not well chosen. the reader has to
>figure out (from their juxtaposition) that the "a" and "an" in
>question are the indefinite article and not any of the other things
>spelled "a" or "an" (many of which are not morphemes). note that the
>use of spelling is problematic. as is the fact that these morphemes
>are also words.
>
>there's plenty of room here for misunderstanding.
>
>arnold
>
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