[Lingtyp] Explicating morpheme boundaries

[Zingler, Tim]

Dear Joe, dear all,


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.

Previous research on that issue, with compatible results, can be found in Bybee et al. (1990), in this volume:

https://benjamins.com/catalog/tsl.20?srsltid=AfmBOopGoDDksgrf9l02wZ41FuMVBL8d5wdfgVZ6EW_uOndXCFIWFl63

Best,

Tim
________________________________
Von: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> im Auftrag von Joe Blythe via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Gesendet: Sonntag, 20. Oktober 2024 07:22
An: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Betreff: [Lingtyp] Explicating morpheme boundaries

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>
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