What is a morpheme?

Jonathan Robie jonathan at texcel.no
Wed Feb 3 09:29:34 EST 1999


At 07:15 AM 2/2/99 -0600, Carl W. Conrad wrote:
 
>George: Before you allow that untrammeled imagination to leap into the deep
>with your readiness to equate all the instances of morphologically
>functioning -S-, you had better consider a few more:
>
>	--with -W- in the adverbial suffix -WS
>	--nominative sg. ending (1 decl. masc., 2 decl. O-stems, 3 decl.
>		consonant stems, -I- stems, -U- stems; active ptc. stems in
>-NT-
>	--with -E- in the nominative pl. ending -ES (3 decl.)
>	--with -AI- in the dative pl. ending -AIS (1 decl.), -OI- in the dative
>		pl. ending -OIS (2 dec.), with -I- in the dative pl. ending -SI
>		(3 decl.)
>	--with -N- in the accusative pl. ending  (historical 1 decl. -AS; 2
>		decl. -OUS; 3 decl. -AS)
>	--in 2 sg. pronouns (SU, SOU, SOI, SE, even if these derive from an
>		earlier TU, TyOU, TOI, TE)
>	--in 2 sg. verb morphology (primary & secondary active -S; primary MP
>		-SAI; secondary MP -SO)
I was talking to a computational linguist during a wonderful Thai dinner,
and I mentioned some morphological tables I have been preparing for Little
Greek. I asked him whether there is any objective test for a morpheme, and
he claimed that there is no test that really works, that it is basically a
matter of making tables and subjectively assigning meaning.

Is this an extreme view? What tests do y'all use for morphemes?

Jonathan
___________________________________________________________________________

Jonathan Robie		jwrobie at mindspring.com

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