|
 |
Fuzzy distinctions in morphology | ||
Tags: Morphology | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes  Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 1 of 17 06 April 2010 at 3:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
The thread What exactly are cases? made me think about the distinctions betwen endings (flexives), affixes and supposedly independent words in a bound form in general. No matter how much we try to make clear definitions there will always be situations that aren't covered, or the facts can be interpreted in several ways. Even the notion of word border isn't given a priori:
Bound forms and attached 'free' words In Latin you sometimes had conjunctions in a bound form: -que (and), -num ('I wonder whether'), -ne (not). Their only connection with the word they are attached to is the initial position of that word. These forms are bound, but neither typical suffixes or endings because their grammatical function lies with the sentence, not with the 'host'. One more example: the genitive -s of English and Danish. In Danish (unlike English) you can also use it with inanimates, but there is another construction which is more significant (though also rarer): the -s can be attached to a whole substantive syntagm: "kongen af Danmarks bolcher"* (KingThe of Denmark's sweets = [the] sweets of the king of Denmark). But its grammatical and semantic ties are with "the king", not with "Denmark" to which it is attached. Some Danish grammarians have quite generally refused to see the -s as an ending because of this type of contructions. *A traditional type of candy the minimal number of forms for a case system = 2 ? Now, if you can use -s (in both Danish and English) then it is always -s (unlike Anglosaxon which had several genitive endings). And it only denotes genitival function, in competition or sometimes open fight with the -s for plural and a possible final -s in the root (the Joneses' name --> the name of the Jones-in-plural). So why isn't it seen as a particle or rather a suffix like those in the agglutinative languages? My guess is that we still have some sense of case function tied to the normal forms of the substantive (singular and plural), maybe because the pronouns still have a separate object form (I - me - my), so we can't just accept that the substantive isn't inflected, but just marked with a genitival suffix. And then it just seem logical to see the -s as an ending alternating with a zero ending. Not-so-independent words In all Romance languages unstressed personal pronouns are generally quite happy to jump from a status as presumed 'free' words in front of a verb to presumed bound-words attached to the end of it: (je) me le dit - dites-le-moi (with at least "le" being exactly the same word. To my mind it is mostly a convention that dictates that the postpositioned forms are seen as independent words rather than as part of the verb. The stress pattern is certainly that of an extension to the preceding verb. In Icelandic you have ordinary endings for nouns which indicate case, number and gender (and they are endings, not suffixes because they can't be split into indeclinable 'atoms' with each one function). However depending on the context you can place either a 'free' prepositioned definite article OR attach a slightly reduced version of it to the noun (after the proper ending). There is one case where ending and article fuse (-um+um --> -unum), but otherwise their inflections are running totally independent of each other. In all Icelandic grammars both are seen as endings coexisting within the word border. But from a bird's eye perspective there is no argument that can explain that -le-moi in the French example are seen as two true words and the postclitic definite article of Icelandic as an ending. There is one situation where an unstressed pronoun is tied even closer to a verbal form than its own ending: the Portuguese conditionals and futurs. These are normally seen as typical paradigma based on endings: eu falaria, tu falarias etc (I would speak, your-singular would speak..). But at least in European Portuguese a personal pronoun - which otherwise is an independent word - can be squeezed in between the root and the ending: eu falar-lhe-ia (I would talk to him). If one can separate two sequences they are normally NOT seen as belonging to the same word, but in Portuguese the condicional is traditionally seen as a paradigm consisting of single words, in spite of the quirk concerning the intrusive pronouns. And that makes for endings that can be split from their roots by normally independent words. The only alternative would be to claim that -lhe- isn't the same thing as lhe, which isn't practical given that it has exactly the same forms as the pronoun. To be or not to be a paradigm The situation in Irish is also worth noting: in the following table with the present forms of the verb for 'to close' you notice that 4 out of 6 forms have 'fágann' plus an unstressed presonal pronnoun, while 1. person singular and plural have forms with 'built-in' ending. The grammars don't quite agree on the distribution of these two construction types, but they all agree that there are those two (I have quoted the Verbix.com site). Irish grammars don't see fágann isolated as a present form, - it is the combination of an 'independent' form plus the pronoun that distinguishes the present. The reason is clearly the existence of synthetic and compound forms within the same table. 1 sg. fágaim / 2 sg. fágann tú / 3 sg. fágann sé // 1 pl. fágaimid / 2 pl. fágann sibh / 3 pl. fágann siad Other forms of the verb have another distributions of synthetic and compound forms. On top of that the future and conditional forms have infixes, and the past (i.e. perfect), imperfect and and conditional forms display a typical change at the beginning of the words: 1 sg. d'fhágfainn / 2 sg. d'fhágfá / 3 sg. d'fhágfadh sé // 1 pl. d'fhágfaimis / 2 pl. d'fhágfadh sibh /3 pl. d'fhágfaidís The basic process here is called lenition, and it changes for instance a 'b' into (written) 'bh', which is pronounced as /v/. Most consonants are changed in a similar way, but /fh/ is silent. OK, enter a secondary process that put a 'd' in front of verbs beginning in a vowel, and the result is "d'fh", which is pronounced as /d/. Now lenition is certainly neither an affix nor a flexive, but something I normally call a process (which I may be alone in doing). Another example of a process is the socalled 'ablaut' ('vokalbrydning' in Danish), which denotes the change of vowels in Germanic strong verbs: I sink - i sank - I have sunk -to sink. There are several patterns of these changes, but they all serve to distinguish the forms of strong verbs. Weak verbs have the same vowel, but uses instead endings to mark different forms. Some kind of summary So morphological distinctions can be marked by the use of flexives, affixes (ie. prefixes, infixes, suffixes), bound or unbound words, 'processes' and markers based on wordorder or intonation, which I haven't even mentioned yet. It's a mess, but an entertaining mess. Edited by Iversen on 06 April 2010 at 8:43pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Danac Diglot Senior Member Denmark Joined 5348 days ago 162 posts - 257 votes Speaks: Danish*, English Studies: German, Serbo-Croatian, French, Russian, Esperanto | Message 2 of 17 06 April 2010 at 4:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
It is indeed a very interesting subject, and it makes my grammatical spider sense tingle!
I was somehow reminded of clitic ordering in Serbo-Croatian when I read your post, and more or less automatically had a look at the Wikipedia article ("Clitic") on the subject. They describe clitics as a word which is somewhere between a word and an affix, and they actually (almost) mention some of the same exaples you do in your post. All this grammar is beginning to make my head spin, so I have to stop here. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6011 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 3 of 17 06 April 2010 at 4:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
Before reading your post, I would have argued that (excluding pronouns), English has 3 marked cases:
Nominative, genitive and possessive. The nominative is our normal case. The possessive is the case with added 's. The genitive is the contentious one. I say that in "window cleaner", window is a marked genitive. Why? Because logically, a window cleaner is "a cleaner of windows" -- plural. The English nominative case declines for number, but nouns do not decline for number in a genitival position, therefore cannot be in the nominative form. But your discussion of the nature of 's (along with me reading somewhere a few months ago that 's was originally a contraction of "is": the king's trousers = the king his trousers) has got me thinking that maybe there is only two cases: nominative and genitive. The possessive would then not be a "case", but a grammatical unit consisting of a noun (or noun phrase) + 's. This would explain the lack of duplication of the S in the plural possessive quite neatly: if 's governs the genitive case in the preceding noun, then the preceding noun doesn't actually decline for number, and although we write "the dogs' bones", this is just a matter of convention, because our internal grammar would represent this as in fact "the dog's bones". Edit: The lack of plural marking in the genitive is the general rule, but this appears to be changing thanks to words beginning with S, in particular "services". The phrase "facility services" is phonetically identical to "facilities services", so the latter is often written. Google has 837K matches for "facility services" and 325K for "facilities services". This intrusive pluralisation of the genitive is already bleeding out beyond words starting with S -- the existence of "facilities services" has led to the term "facilities management" (and other derivative forms) coming into use, and University student organisations often have an "Entertainments Officer/Convener/Coordinator". Edited by Cainntear on 06 April 2010 at 4:58pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 4 of 17 06 April 2010 at 4:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
This also ties into something that I read where the fearsome (for a native speaker of an Indo-European language) number of cases and their associated suffixes in Hungarian is on balance comparable to the functions in Indo-European languages with syncretism of cases combined with the inventory of prepositions. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6768 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 5 of 17 06 April 2010 at 5:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
That's a very interesting analysis, Cainntear. I sometimes wonder, though, if genitives/possessives are proper cases. Isn't the main definition of "case" that aspect of nouns which indicate their relationship with the verb? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5381 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 6 of 17 06 April 2010 at 5:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
If window is genitive in window cleaner, when what is travel in travel mug? These are noun compounds. That's all there is to it.
English used to have cases and apart from the possessive s and the case distinctions remaining in the personal pronouns, cases are no longer active in English. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 17 06 April 2010 at 9:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
I had not thought about the "the king's trousers" construction, but I doubt that it comes from 'his', as in "Waters his love" or "Williams his love" (the names of two Elizabethan masques (small plays with music)). The simple reason for this is that my Old English Grammar indicates that most masculine nouns had genitive singular forms in -s already in the Anglosaxon period (whereas feminine genitives normally would end in -r, cfr. modern "his" and "her"). So there is no need to see the -s as the rest of "his". So the construction with a genitive and the one with a possessive pronoun must have been separate from each other, but competing until the Elizabethan period, where the latter for some reason died out. In Dutch and Low German, however, you still find precisely this kind of construction: "Jaap zijn hoed" or "Marijke haar fiets". In my opinion this construction is a clear case of extraposition. A painter could say "Ik heb geschilderd Marijke haar fiets" (I have painted Marijke her bicycle", where "bicycle" is the central noun in the nominal syntagm that is used as direct object. But is "Marijke" as extraposition also part of that syntagm, or are extrapositions placed somewhere outside, but attached to the syntagm? That's the question. Finally: what about the window cleaner? I would probably just accept that words nouns can be connected through juxtaposition without specifying any spefic case for the elements in this construction. I have a nagging feeling that Cainntear's first analysis, where the second element was seen as a genitive of some sorts, is caused by a parallel with Latin, where it clearly is a genitive (which semantically can be 'objective' or 'subjective'). In English there is no case marker and tehrefore also no reason to assign it to any specific case. Edited by Iversen on 06 April 2010 at 9:14pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6011 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 8 of 17 06 April 2010 at 11:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
I had not thought about the "the king's trousers" construction, but I doubt that it comes from 'his', as in "Waters his love" or "Williams his love" (the names of two Elizabethan masques (small plays with music)). The simple reason for this is that my Old English Grammar indicates that most masculine nouns had genitive singular forms in -s already in the Anglosaxon period (whereas feminine genitives normally would end in -r, cfr. modern "his" and "her"). So there is no need to see the -s as the rest of "his".[/QUOTE] I know really wish I'd bookmarked the page, because this is all ringing bells -- IIRC, the article I was reading claimed that at one point the possessive was commonly written in two ways -- The king his trouser (to be grammatically explicit) and the king's trousers (to be a better phonological match). The scholars of the time didn't like the native structures as they didn't match Latin (so much of the problems of English stem from people with an unnatural fetish for Latin!!) and some of them proposed using the Anglosaxon genitive instead ("the kingis trousers"... or was it kingus? I don't know), as that was a better match to classical Latin grammar. In the end 's was accepted as it at least was like an inflection rather than being a truly separate words. I'm pretty certain there was a direct quote from a grammarian of the time saying how he would "settle for" (or some term along those lines) apostrophe-s. Now this may or may not be true. What I can tell you for sure is that I read this, but who what I can't tell you who is wrote it, so I can't say how reliable it is!
As I say, the only marking is the lack of inflection for number, which some grammarians call "adjectival". This particular use bugs me because a noun in this position can't do what adjectives do: *The cleaner is window. And adjectives can't do what these nouns do: The window cleaner is cleaning windows but not *The white cleaner is cleaning white. Edited by Cainntear on 06 April 2010 at 11:18pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
