bound roots

[Carson Schutze]

>  Does anyone have a clear explanation of how to distinguish
> words with affix-looking parts from words that really have affixes + bound
> roots, preferably an explanation that does not require looking up
> derivations in the dictionary?
>

No, no one does, if by "really have" you are asking about their status in
the minds of present-day speakers, and a dictionary wouldn't help. One can
of course define "morpheme" in various ways and then strictly follow the
definition, but the examples you mention already suggest that this
intuitively does not yield the answer we want. E.g., if you require an
identifiable constant meaning then the -ceive verbs do not contain a common
morpheme "ceive"; however, the fact that they all have allomorphs in -cept
makes us feel like they ought to share a stem.

On the other hand, for potential bound roots that occur in only one word, it
is hard to argue against a decompositional analysis: 'uncouth' can perfectly
well be analyzed as un+couth if we posit a bound root 'couth' that occurs in
only this word and whose meaning is whatever 'uncouth' means, minus the
negative part (most people seem to agree that one of the productive meanings
of "un" could be part of the meaning of "uncouth"). So we could posit a
definition that says "X is a morpheme in a word XY if X OR Y (or both)
occurs in other words with a meaning that is also part of the meaning of
XY."

Many other variations on a definition can be entertained. To know what's
really true of the human mental lexicon, however, requires experimentation,
of which there has been a great deal in the last 25+ years, much of it using
priming paradigms. Even so, for many of the interesting cases mentioned,
there is as of yet no conclusive evidence one way or the other, in my view.


--

Carson T. Schutze            Department of Linguistics, UCLA
Email: cschutze at ucla.edu     Box 951543, Los Angeles CA  90095-1543  U.S.A.

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