Semiwords and affixoids: The territory between word and affix

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the status of bound forms in compounds and other lexical items, but it ultimately aims at setting up a hierarchy of lexical items of various degrees of "freedom", making use of clear-cut criteria applicable in at least one (fairly large) group of languages. In spite of the difficulties of the various (phonological, morphological, lexical, and semantic) definitions of 'word', Bloomfield's characterization of minimum free forms is applied to designate items at the top of the hierarchy, which are called 'autonomous words'. Bound forms that allow autonomous words to occur between them and the lexical item they are bound to are 'dependent words'. The novelty of this paper lies in dividing the rest of the lexical items "below", i.e., 'nonwords', into three groups: semiwords, affixoids, and affixes, based on a new application of a familiar operation, coordination reduction, which is shown to work both backward and forward for some items, but only backward reduction is possible for others.

Suspended Affixation as Morpheme Ellipsis: Evidence from Ossetic Alternative Questions

“…Other terms used in the literature are brachylogy, morphological ellipsis, both used by Pounder (2006), coordination reduction, Kenesei (2007), and unbalanced coordination, Johannessen (1998). The latter work provides a number of examples of this phenomenon from the world's languages.…”

Suspended affixation in Ossetic and the structure of the syntax-morphology interface

“…Alternative terms used in the literature are brachylogy, morphological ellipsis, both used by Pounder (2006), coordination reduction, Kenesei (2007), and unbalanced coordination, Johannessen (1998). The latter work provides a number of examples of this phenomenon from the world's languages.…”

“…Orgun (1995) analyzes a constraint in Turkish, whereby a case marker can be suspended only together with plural marker and possessive suffixes, if the latter are present. Kenesei (2007) assumes the deletion analysis and suggests a classification of morphemes based on their degree of autonomy. He proposes that only right-suspension can exist (based on semantic differences between rightward and leftward ellipsis), i.e., that examples of type (2) should be ungrammatical.…”

Variability in the articulation and perception of a word

“…The difficulty of the exact definition of their mental representations is aggravated by a mismatch between various (phonological, morphological, lexical, and semantic) definitions of the notion of 'word' itself (cf. Zwitserlood 2003;Kenesei 2007). Meaning is supposed to be mentally encoded by humans (Jackendoff 2002).…”