LINGUIST List 22.2608 Thu Jun 23 2011 Sum: Early Sense of the Word 'Morpheme' Editor for this issue: Brent Woo <bwoolinguistlist.org> To post to LINGUIST, use our convenient web form at http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.cfm. Directory         1.     Stephen Anderson , Early Sense of the Word 'Morpheme' Message 1: Early Sense of the Word 'Morpheme' Date: 21-Jun-2011 From: Stephen Anderson <srayale.edu> Subject: Early Sense of the Word 'Morpheme' E-mail this message to a friend Query for this summary posted in LINGUIST Issue: 22.2346 In Linguist List issue 22-2346, I asked for enlightenment about the source of an early specialized sense of the word "morpheme": I received a number of replies. Several people suggested that this usage should be attributed to Martinet, and indeed he does distinguish "lexèmes" (roots) from "morphèmes" (affixes, etc.) within the broader class of "monèmes" (more or less Baudouin de Courtenay's "morphemes") in his theoretical work. But since Martinet was born in 1908, it seems unlikely that his usage was familiar to Saussure, as Wells would have to have been suggesting. Martinet's usage is probably derived from somewhere else in the tradition of French linguistics, and the next hint I got of the answer was a pointer to Vendryès, who uses the word in the specialized sense (as opposed to the "sémantème" or root) in his book "Le language" (translated by Paul Radin in 1925 as "Language"). While Vendryès' book was only published in 1921, he indicates that most of it was actually written before World War I, and so this is a rather better possibility. Vendryès, however, was very much a student of Meillet, and it seemed more likely that he would have derived this term from that source. And so I was pointed to a source I should have been familiar with by Hans Christian Luschützky: Mugdan, Joachim (1986). "Was ist eigentlich ein Morphem?" in Zeitschrift für Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung 39:29-43. The author of this article contacted me shortly after to point it out, and to indicate that the usage in question originates in Meillet's French translation of Brugmann's 1904 Comparative Grammar of Indo- European. Brugmann himself used the word "Formans" to refer to affixes and other indicators of morphological category, and Meillet picked up "morphème" as the French equivalent of Baudouin de Courtenay's coinage. In a letter to Baudouin, he acknowledged his use of the latter's "joli mot" in this sense. My vague recollection mentioned in my enquiry is actually of Jakobson's recounting of this story in his article on the Kazan' School. So the specialized sense of "morpheme" as referring to non-root formatives is due to Meillet. The notion itself should perhaps be traced to Brugmann, who discusses it in a 1908 article Brugmann, Karl (1908). Formans oder Formativum? Anzeiger für indogermanische Sprach- und Altertumskunde 29:69-72. A similarly specialized use is that of Hjelmslev, who uses (the equivalent of) "morpheme" to refer not to a formative element in a word, but (roughly) to an inflectional category, an element of content, not form. Another unusual early use of the word is that of the Swedish linguist Adolf Noreen, who calls more or less any stretch of phonological material with an associated meaning a "morpheme": thus, all of "dog","- s", "dogs", "big dogs", etc. are "morphemes" in this sense. Paul Kiparsky noted that his father, the Slavicist Valentin Kiparsky, used the word in this way. This history, and some more, will be reviewed in a chapter I have written for the Oxford Handbook of Inflection, being edited by Matthew Baerman. Thanks to those who responded to my question, including Joaquim Brandão de Carvalho, Stefano Canalis, Francisco Dubert, Sean Jensen, Remi Jolivet, Paul Kiparsky, Hans Christian Luschützky, Joachim Mugdan, Karl Reinhardt, and James Vanden Bosch. If I have omitted anyone's name, I apologize. -- Steve Anderson Linguistic Field(s): History of Linguistics                             Morphology Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue Page Updated: 23-Jun-2011       About LINGUIST    |   Contact Us       While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents.