1 All in a Day ’ s Week

This paper presents a Frame Semantics analysis of calendric terms in English, Hebrew, and German, demonstrating the inextricable relationship between morphology and semantics. Here, we consider how Frame Semantics can be extended to morphological analysis. Traditionally, the morpheme has been taken as the smallest unit of meaning in linguistic analysis, with generative word formation rules generating words from individual morphemes (Hockett 1954, Kiparsky 1968, Aronoff 1976, Scalise 1986). However, the traditional definition of morpheme is problematic when it comes to words containing parts that do not have meaning in isolation (so-called cranberry-morphs). For example, Bybee (1988: 128) and Waugh (1996: 257) point out that English weekday names consist of two parts, the morpheme day in combination with other units (e.g. Mon-, Tues-, Wed-), the latter of which do not encode meaning in isolation. To overcome the theoretical problems associated with empty morphemes, Bybee’s (1988) alternative model regards the morphological component of the grammar as part of the lexicon. Section one of the paper discusses Bybee’s (1988) morphological analysis of English weekday names within her storage and processing model. Section two takes Bybee’s approach and applies its findings to the analysis of Hebrew and German weekday names. We show that Bybee’s approach is problematic when applied to sets of weekday names that do not follow a coherent morphological pattern indicating their membership in the same class of semantically related words. In section three, we propose a frame semantic analysis, and show that a more detailed morphological analysis reveals information about the frame structure needed for the use and interpretation of weekday names in English, Hebrew, and German. We define the Calendric Unit frame with words that name the different parts of the calendric cycle, both man-made and natural. In addition, by employing the frame to organize and characterize the underlying conceptual structure of the Calendric Unit terms, we illustrate the efficacy of Frame Semantics for research in contrastive lexicology. Our discussion illustrates that a frame-semantic approach to morphology accounts for the “cranberry-morpheme problem” straightforwardly by not considering empty morphemes in isolation. Instead, we argue that cranberry morphemes become interpretable because of the background frame