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Article published In:
Studies in Language
Vol. 41:4 (2017) ► pp.914–955

Beyond roots and affixes

Äiwoo deverbal nominals and the typology of bound lexical morphemes

| University of Oslo

This paper discusses the analysis of a particular class of morphemes in the Oceanic language Äiwoo, and argues that the difficulties in accounting for them in traditional terms such as nominalisation, compounding, relative clauses, or classifiers is due to their status as bound lexical morphemes, also known as bound roots, an under-discussed category in linguistic literature. It proposes some parameters of variation within bound lexical morphemes as a class and shows that the Äiwoo facts can be best accounted for by reference to these parameters, both in terms of language-internal description and crosslinguistic comparability. It argues that understanding crosslinguistic morphological structure in terms of a dichotomy between “roots” and “affixes” underplays the existing variation in linguistic structure, and that a more detailed examination is necessary of forms which do not fit clearly into this dichotomy; the discussion of the Äiwoo data aims to provide a starting-point for such an examination.

Keywords: morphology, bound roots, nominalisation, Oceanic
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Generic bound nouns (gbns) in Äiwoo
    • 2.1Introduction
    • 2.2Generic bound nouns
    • 2.3Possessives and demonstratives
    • 2.4Bare verbs
    • 2.5Aspect/mood and person marking
    • 2.6Additional arguments and other elements
  • 3.Analysing the generic bound noun constructions
    • 3.1The nominalisation analysis
    • 3.2The compounding analysis
    • 3.3The relative clause analysis
    • 3.4The classifier analysis
  • 4.The problem of bound lexical morphemes
    • 4.1Bound lexical morphemes as a general category
    • 4.2A preliminary typology of bound nouns
      • A.Obligatorily inflected nouns
      • B.Obligatorily modified nouns
      • C.Obligatorily compounding nouns
      • D.Obligatorily modifying nouns
      • E.Incorporated nouns
  • 5.Äiwoo bound nouns revisited
    • 5.1Directly possessed nouns
    • 5.2Plant-part and body-part nouns
    • 5.3Reduced compound forms
    • 5.4Revisiting the parameters
    • 5.5An account of the gbns
    • 5.6The categories ‘root’ and ‘affix’
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 March 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.16087.nae
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