[Lingtyp] Explicating morpheme boundaries

[Christian Lehmann]

A comprehensive analytic procedure is described in
Nida, Eugene A. 1949, /Morphology. The descriptive analysis of words./ 
Ann Arbor, Mich.: . 2. ed.

A summary of the method is in
https://www.christianlehmann.eu/ling/lg_system/grammar/morph_syn/index.php?open=strukt_morphologie.inc#Morph_Analyse

As for vowelless prefixes, Russian has lots of them.
Best, Christian
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Am 20.10.24 um 07:22 schrieb Joe Blythe via Lingtyp:
> Dear typologists,
>
> 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.
>
> All the best
>
> Joe
>
>
> *Joe Blythe*
> Associate Professor | Department of Linguistics | Macquarie University
> Room 514, 12 Second Way, North Ryde, NSW 2109, Australia
> Vice President (Conferences), Australian Linguistic Society
>
> joe.blythe at mq.edu.au  | www 
> <https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/persons/joe-blythe>
> Ph: +61-2-9850-8089  |   Mob: +61-409-88-1153
> /Macquarie Linguistics Conversation Analysis Lab 
> <https://www.mq.edu.au/about/about-the-university/our-faculties/medicine-and-health-sciences/departments-and-centres/department-of-linguistics/our-research/conversation-analysis>/
> /Conversational Interaction in Aboriginal and Remote Australia 
> <https://www.ciaraproject.com/>/
> /OzSpace:/ /Landscape, language and culture in Indigenous Australia/ 
> <https://ozspace.org/>
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Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann
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99092 Erfurt
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