Query Details

Query Subject:	Early Sense of the Word 'Morpheme'
Author:	Stephen Anderson
Submitter Email:	click here to access email

Linguistic LingField(s):	Morphology History of Linguistics Discipline of Linguistics

Query:	Wells (1947:8) says that "the term morphème was current in Saussure's day, but with a specialized significance: the 'formative' elements of a word (affixes, endings, etc.) as opposed to the root." On the other hand, there is consensus that the word was invented by Baudouin de Courtenay, and his 1895 definition is "that part of a word which is endowed with psychological autonomy and is for the very same reason not further divisible. It consequently subsumes such concepts as the root (radix), all possible affixes, (suffixes, prefixes), endings which are exponents of syntactic relationships, and the like" (translation from Stankiewicz's Anthology). I vaguely recall something like the usage Wells reports, but I can't find a source. In particular, everything in Baudouin, Kruszewsky, and other work of that vintage seems to use Baudouin's general sense rather than the limited one. Can anyone enlighten me about some early linguist who used 'morpheme' in a way that excluded roots? -- Steve Anderson
LL Issue:	22.2346
Date posted:	03-Jun-2011
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