bound roots

[Benjamin Munson]

Dear List-Mates:

I feel compelled to chime in.  I would like to echo Marc Joanisse's
statement that the difference between decomposed and non-decomposed words
is continuous rather than discrete.  In addition to the reference he
suggested, I would point you to the research of Jen Hay.  She showed that
the extent to which a derived word can be decomposed into a
root-plus-derivational morpheme is dependent on the relative frequency of
the stem and the derived form.  This is illustrated in the following article:

Hay, Jennifer (2001) Lexical Frequency in Morphology: Is Everything
Relative? Linguistics , 39 (6), 2001, pg 1041-1070.

I would also point you to other relevant papers by her:

Hay, Jennifer (2002) From Speech Perception to Morphology: Affix-ordering
Revisited.  Language 78.3, 2002: 527-555.
Hay, Jennifer and Ingo Plag (2004)  What constrains possible suffix
combinations?  On the interaction of grammatical and processing
restrictions in derivational morphology.   Natural Language and Linguistic
Theory 22: 565-596

I'm not sure that detailed analyses in these articles clearly inform
language pedagogy (re Caroline's original question), but they are nifty and
relevant works nonetheless, and they serve to bolster Marc's point about
these differences being continuous.

Cordially,
Ben Munson
Asst. Prof., Dept. of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

At 05:49 PM 11/11/04, Carolyn Chaney wrote:
>In my Language for Teachers class we were discussing various kinds of
>morphemes, and we discovered that we had difficulty knowing if certain
>words were free morphemes or a combo of an affix plus a bound root.  This
>was particularly difficult when the word has a syllable that looks like am
>affix, such as mothER or DEcide.  Cases where there are several like words
>(receive, deceive, conceive) look like bound roots.  Mother seems clearly
>to be a free morpheme, as a mother is not one who moths.  But what about
>decide?  inept?  nonchalant?  uncouth?  refine?  Uncouth, for example, is
>given in texts as an affix plus bound root, but surely it doesn't mean
>not-couth.  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?
>
>Thanks for the help!
>
>Carolyn Chaney
>Just call me stumped
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