Zompist Bboard Again

bradrn wrote: ↑Tue May 05, 2026 3:49 pmA pity; it’s very interesting, and relevant to the topic at hand.

Maybe if I can find some time, it's not that linguistics don't interest me, but time is always lacking...


JAL

Or, moreover, any situation where a feature is realised over two or more surface morphemes, a.k.a. ‘distributed exponence’. (I’d be very interested to know what jal would make of, say, the bipartite TAMP forms in Dorig , or for that matter any of the stuff that Komnzo gets up to…) Lol, I wouldn't b...

So if -en isn’t a morpheme, then what is it? A syllable, part of a single morpheme. I don't see much difference between "sleep" / "slept" or "go" / "went" on the one hand, and "write" / "written" on the other, with regards to phonemic anal...

A morpheme is an idemtifiable element of a word that changes the meaning. driven without the -(e)n would be the base form, not a past participle. Ergo it's a morpheme, even if not a productive one (although even that is debatable, as people have formed things like boughten ). And as -en is an ident...

I really don't understand jal's arguments here -- he seems to be saying that any non-fully-productive affixes are collectively part of the stem, and any change in them is a change in the entire stem, and he seems to be denying that ablaut is an example of nonconcatenative morphology that can be ana...

So all possible combinations of historical morphemes have to each be treated as part of a synchronic stem if not all such combinations are synchronically accessible? I would argue so, yes. What use is describing a "morpheme", in a synchronic analysis, if the intended morpheme is neither p...

Yep, and not just "now", they counted already when I studied linguistics over 30 years ago (to be exact, "sing", "sang", and "sung" are three different morphemes). Well, of course these are three different morphemes (like I named "write", "wrot...

Would you argue that something does not have morpheme-hood just because it is not productive per se? I would argue that synchronically it indeed would not have morpheme-hood, because the meaning attached to it is indistinguishable from the meaning of the word as a whole. written cannot synchronical...

Also false. I'm pretty sure I successfully analysed the past form brung the first time I heard it. (I cannot remember my initial act of relating brought to bring . That may have been a slower process, as I still have some trouble with distinguishing brought and bought .) It's so funny that on the o...

I would say four different morphemes, as there are three different morphemes in the stem ablaut, and an extra morpheme in the - en past participle ending. No, I argue that the -en isn't a synchronic morpheme, your specific dialectal oddities notwithstanding. Would you argue that in your native Dutc...

- en is a semi-productive morpheme in my dialect. For instance, new strong past participles with - en can be derived from strong preterites in cases, such as aten and dranken . (Yes I will say and have heard both of these, and they did not sound ungrammatical to me or to the person with whom I was ...

Richard W wrote: ↑Tue Apr 28, 2026 3:47 pmAre you saying that write, wrote and written have but a single morpheme between them, or are you saying they're three different morphemes?

Three different ones. They cannot, syncronically, be analyzed otherwise.


JAL

I hope you mean 'irregular'; 'suppletion' means the substitution of a different stem altogether You're right, "suppletion" is not quite the right term here, as "written" is diachronically related to "write". How do you express the analyses of wrote and written into mor...

And then there's <-en>, which marks the past participle, and some would say in weak verbs generally has the same form as <-ed>. The past participle is marked by -ed, just like the past tense. -en isn't synchronically a past participle morpheme, I consider forms like "written" to be suplet...

bradrn wrote: ↑Tue Apr 28, 2026 11:54 am(I agree with your previous post, too, though I tend to regard the ‘inflectional’ vs ‘agglutinative’ distinction as oversimplified.)

One cannot describe languages in general without oversimplification :D.


JAL

bradrn wrote: ↑Tue Apr 28, 2026 8:29 amPretty much, yes. In English I would say that <-ed> is a morpheme whose sole function is as a past tense

<-ed> doubles as a morpheme to form the past participle. So the past tense is not its sole function.


JAL

Terminological question: Does a tense have a morpheme? It feels hard to say that the English simple past has a morpheme, and this is not an isolated example - good examples can be found in all of the 3 classical IE languages. Let's first get clear what a morpheme is : it's the smallest bearer of in...

rotting bones wrote: ↑Thu Apr 23, 2026 8:55 pmI'm too depressed to keep working on this.

I'm sorry to hear that.


JAL

Ich sehe den den Hund tretenden Mann. Ich sehe den gehenden Mann. Ich sehe den gestern seinen Hund getreten habenden Mann. All of these are 'grammatical' but utterly unhinged in German. (The second one is OK.) In very formal written German, these long participle phrases do sometimes appear, but the...

I have thought up how transitive relative clauses work in Reháľa Kâp, which is essentially as participles agreeing with the relativized argument as an adjective and any other arguments (but not the relativized argument) with agreement clitics, with relative agreement clitics only being found for re...