22.2608, Sum: Early Sense of the Word 'Morpheme'

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LINGUIST List: Vol-22-2608. Thu Jun 23 2011. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 22.2608, Sum: Early Sense of the Word 'Morpheme'

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1)
Date: 21-Jun-2011
From: Stephen Anderson [sra at yale.edu]
Subject: Early Sense of the Word 'Morpheme'
 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2011 11:27:23
From: Stephen Anderson [sra at yale.edu]
Subject: Early Sense of the Word 'Morpheme'

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Query for this summary posted in LINGUIST Issue: 22.2346                                                                                                                                               
 

In Linguist List issue 22-2346, I asked for enlightenment about the 
source of an early specialized sense of the word "morpheme":

I received a number of replies. Several people suggested that this 
usage should be attributed to Martinet, and indeed he does distinguish 
"lexèmes" (roots) from "morphèmes" (affixes, etc.) within the broader 
class of "monèmes" (more or less Baudouin de Courtenay's 
"morphemes") in his theoretical work. But since Martinet was born in 
1908, it seems unlikely that his usage was familiar to Saussure, as 
Wells would have to have been suggesting.

Martinet's usage is probably derived from somewhere else in the 
tradition of French linguistics, and the next hint I got of the answer was 
a pointer to Vendryès, who uses the word in the specialized sense (as 
opposed to the "sémantème" or root) in his book "Le language" 
(translated by Paul Radin in 1925 as "Language"). While Vendryès' 
book was only published in 1921, he indicates that most of it was 
actually written before World War I, and so this is a rather better 
possibility. Vendryès, however, was very much a student of Meillet, and 
it seemed more likely that he would have derived this term from that 
source.

And so I was pointed to a source I should have been familiar with by 
Hans Christian Luschützky:

Mugdan, Joachim (1986). "Was ist eigentlich ein Morphem?" in 
Zeitschrift für Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und 
Kommunikationsforschung 39:29-43.

The author of this article contacted me shortly after to point it out, and 
to indicate that the usage in question originates in Meillet's French 
translation of Brugmann's 1904 Comparative Grammar of Indo-
European. Brugmann himself used the word "Formans" to refer to 
affixes and other indicators of morphological category, and Meillet 
picked up "morphème" as the French equivalent of Baudouin de 
Courtenay's coinage. In a letter to Baudouin, he acknowledged his use 
of the latter's "joli mot" in this sense. My vague recollection mentioned 
in my enquiry is actually of Jakobson's recounting of this story in his 
article on the Kazan' School.

So the specialized sense of "morpheme" as referring to non-root 
formatives is due to Meillet. The notion itself should perhaps be traced 
to Brugmann, who discusses it in a 1908 article

Brugmann, Karl (1908). Formans oder Formativum? Anzeiger für 
indogermanische Sprach- und Altertumskunde 29:69-72.

A similarly specialized use is that of Hjelmslev, who uses (the 
equivalent of) "morpheme" to refer not to a formative element in a 
word, but (roughly) to an inflectional category, an element of content, 
not form.

Another unusual early use of the word is that of the Swedish linguist 
Adolf Noreen, who calls more or less any stretch of phonological 
material with an associated meaning a "morpheme": thus, all of "dog","-
s", "dogs", "big dogs", etc. are "morphemes" in this sense. Paul 
Kiparsky noted that his father, the Slavicist Valentin Kiparsky, used the 
word in this way.

This history, and some more, will be reviewed in a chapter I have 
written for the Oxford Handbook of Inflection, being edited by Matthew 
Baerman.

Thanks to those who responded to my question, including Joaquim 
Brandão de Carvalho, Stefano Canalis, Francisco Dubert, Sean 
Jensen, Remi Jolivet, Paul Kiparsky, Hans Christian Luschützky, 
Joachim Mugdan, Karl Reinhardt, and James Vanden Bosch.  If I have 
omitted anyone's name, I apologize.
-- 
Steve Anderson 

Linguistic Field(s): History of Linguistics
                     Morphology







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