A short History of Morphological Theory
نویسنده
چکیده
Interest in the nature of language has included attention to the nature and structure of words — what we call Morphology— at least since the studies of the ancient Indian, Greek and Arab grammarians, and so any history of the subject that attempted to cover its entire scope could hardly be a short one. Nonetheless, any history has to start somewhere, and in tracing the views most relevant to the state of morphological theory today, we can usefully start with the views of Saussure. No, not that Saussure, not the generally acknowledged progenitor of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure. Instead, his brother René, a mathematician, who was a major figure in the early twentieth century Esperanto movement (Joseph 2012). Most of his written work was on topics in mathematics and physics, and on Esperanto, but de Saussure (1911) is a short (122 page) book devoted to word structure, in which he lays out a view of morphology that anticipates one side of a major theoretical opposition that we will follow below. René de Saussure begins by distinguishing simple words, on the one hand, and compounds (e.g., French porte-plume ‘pen-holder’) and derived words (e.g., French violoniste ‘violinist’), on the other. For the purposes of analysis, there are only two sorts of words: root words (e.g. French homme ‘man’) and affixes (e.g., French -iste in violoniste). But “[a]u point de vue logique, il n’y a pas de difference entre un radical et un affixe [. . . ] [o]n peut donc considérer les affixes comme des mots simple, et les mots dérivés au moyen d’affixes, comme de véritables mots composés. Il n’y a plus alors que de deux sortes de mots: les mots simples (radicaux, préfixes, suffixes) et les mots composés par combinaison de mots simples.”(de Saussure 1911: pp. 4f.) The simple words are then treated as ‘atoms’, each with an invariant sense and potentially variable content, and the re-
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