16
votes
How to split pronouns 'whom' and 'whose' into morphs?
You could analyze them that way, sure. Perhaps there's an -m morpheme that indicates the accusative case, as seen in who-m, hi-m, the-m.
But I don't think this is a very useful analysis, ...
- 62.2k
9
votes
Accepted
What prevents certain grammatical forms to be analysed as one word?
It is not arbitrary, but it is very theory-dependent. One popular criterion for affix-hood is that affixes tend to affix to a particular word-class, thus if you treat "an" as an affix, you would ...
- 80.3k
7
votes
Accepted
Why is it problematic to assume a null morpheme signifying the singular number of nouns in German?
In short, assuming invisible stuff is always problematic from a theoretical point of view, because you can never really prove it's there, and even worse, you can never really prove it's not there - ...
- 6,448
5
votes
What prevents certain grammatical forms to be analysed as one word?
It's generally assumed that you can't stick material of arbitrary length and near-abitrary content into the middle of a word. As mentioned in Yellow Sky's comment, we can say, in addition to "an apple"...
- 17.4k
4
votes
What prevents certain grammatical forms to be analysed as one word?
Words are the minimal forms that speakers memorize. (There might be exceptions to that general principle.)
There are several peculiarities of words not shared by other expressions, but so far as I ...
- 12.4k
3
votes
Is _ing a derivational suffix in the noun "reading" (as in the event--e.g. a poetry reading)?
There is no derivation or inflection. It is a conversion or also called zero derivation. A verb becomes a noun without affixation. Sometimes, the nominalisation is based on the bare form (e.g change), ...
- 1,497
3
votes
Accepted
Can I form a morphological condition like this?
I think there is a bug in your rule, as you write it, any word can form a plural adding an i, even when the word ends in a vowel.
My corrected version of the rule is
ə → i / _#
∅ → i / C _ #
using ...
- 29.5k
2
votes
Accepted
How to generalize over these morphological rules?
You have actually answered your question.
According to the examples given, possessive is formed with the following pattern:
3rd person Singular: s + root + be
2nd person Plural: s + root + lu
Plus, ...
- 8,557
2
votes
Does adding the suffix -ly to a noun or an adjective provide morphological evidence for word class?
Since -ly can be affixed to nouns (gentlemanly, friendly, ghostly, spritely) and adjectives (unlikely, quickly, heavily, lightly), but not to verbs, then it isn't much use as a diagnostic of word ...
- 80.3k
2
votes
Can I form a morphological condition like this?
"Correct" formulation of rules is relative to some context, for example in the context of a specific theory like Distributed Morphology, or Two Level Morphology. If you are just attempting to describe ...
- 80.3k
2
votes
What is morphological analysis of words to estimate their meaning called?
You could refer to this as compositional analysis: approaching the meaning as transparently composed of the sub-units — the sum of its parts.
The fallacious aspect is that due to semantic drift, ...
- 2,392
2
votes
Roots categorization
This is a common issue in Austronesian linguistics where the notion of precategorial (=functionally unspecified) roots is often employed to explain the fact that roots don't have a POS category until ...
- 6,679
2
votes
Accepted
Roots categorization
Yes, some linguists consider this possible. Here are some such concepts/authors:
"roots":
Pesetsky, David. 1995.Zero syntax: Experiencers and cascades (CurrentStudies in Linguistics 27). ...
- 638
2
votes
Roots categorization
Your hypothesis is true, partially. Tamil employs agglutinative grammar. Suffixes may be used to mark noun class, number, case, verb tense and other grammatical categories.
Wikipedia has a great ...
- 164
1
vote
Accepted
Terminology for this kind of affixes
In the Wikipedia article on Aymara they (i.e., the affix -wa and some similar other affixes) are called phrase-final suffixes with the remark that some authors call them sentence-final suffixes.
- 29.5k
1
vote
Has the notion of "semainophoric" structure been considered so far?
There are, to modern understandings, no universal sequences of sounds with one meaning. If there are correspondences, they are either because the languages are related (the words are cognate), because ...
- 2,354
1
vote
Is there an online Esperanto word stem "diagrammer?"
Saying it linguistically, you are looking for a tool that does morphological analysis for Esperanto. There is a great variety of such tools around and I remember that some of them were also trained ...
- 29.5k
1
vote
Does adding the suffix -ly to a noun or an adjective provide morphological evidence for word class?
It does not provide evidence but it certainly narrows thing down. -ly attaches to nouns and adjectives. It tends to turn nouns into adjectives coward > cowardly, gentleman > gentlemanly and adjectives ...
- 10.6k
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