René de Saussure's theory of word formation (original) (raw)
Related papers
2019
Conference Abstract: The main aims of the conference are to present advances in the interdisciplinary research into word formation (derivation and compounding) in intra-and interinguistic contexts, to analyze relevant problems in the field of tension between intrinsic language change and language interference and to address the need of using the combined methods of synchronic, historical and computational linguistics as well as the united competence of leading European specialists in these specific linguistic disciplines in order to improve the conceptual and methodological apparatus necessary for working in the fields of descriptive, comparative and historical morphology, lexicology, and syntax. To meet each aspect of this interdisciplinary target, the conference aims, on the one hand, at giving space to various theoretical and practical issues regarding word-formation in the course of the language development within and between several groups of Indo-European (Indic, Iranian, Greek, Italic, Anatolian, Germanic) and Semitic languages (Akkadian); on the other hand, it will provide an impetus to research into word-formation in contexts of multilingualism (within Indo-European, within Semitic, but also between Indo-European and Semitic languages, e.g. in Anatolian and Near-Eastern contexts) through the joint input of morphologists and scholars of historical (socio-)linguistics working from comparative and contrastive perspective.
The Phonology and Morphology of Word Formation
The Handbook of Portuguese Linguistics, 2016
Portuguese shares many morphological features with other Romance languages, such as Castilian, Italian, or French, but it also displays properties that set it apart from the other members of the Romance family. In this chapter, we will privilege the latter aspects. The resemblance with other romance languages and, at the same time, the specificity of Portuguese morphology further echoes in the comparison of different national varieties, such as the European (henceforth EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth BP) subsystems. Affixation and compounding are the main word-formation processes in Portuguese. 1 We will present an overview of their main morphological and phonological properties and also some border issues, indicating, when appropriate, contrasts between EP and BP (with reference to the dialects of Lisbon and southern Brazilian variants). In addition, we will discuss some types of word formation not addressed by the grammatical tradition. While influential traditional studies such as Mattoso Câmara (1971) and Basílio (1987), for BP, or Carvalho (1967) and Rio-Torto (1998), for EP, are discussed where appropriate, the discussion in this chapter is especially based on Villalva (1994), Gonçalves (2004), Gonçalves (2012), and Villalva and Silvestre (2014). In our exposition of the Portuguese word-formation processes, we assume that words (W), as morphological structures, are projections of the root (R), which is morphologically specified by a thematic constituent 2 (TC) that generates a stem (S). The stem is then morphosyntactically (MSS)specified. 3 This is the underlying morphological structure of all simple words: (1) [[[X] r [Y] tc ] s [Z] mss ] w Roots are lexical units, specified to a large number of features (their phonological representation and morphological, syntactic and semantic features, among others). One of these features concerns the thematic class to which they belong. Verbs are assigned to a conjugation class (first, second or third), a distinction that has no syntactic or semantic consequences-it is relevant merely for inflection (the phonetics are of the EP variant):
Review of Ferdinand de Saussure, Ecrits de linguistique générale.
SubStance, 2002
That honored contributor to the nineteenth-century disciplines of historical and comparative philology and inventor of such twentieth-century ones as semiotics and structural linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, is often cast as the erratic discoverer who never made the most of his own insights. We hear that Saussure's enunciation of the principle of functional opposition in his Cours de linguistique générale, though clearly and memorably made, left the hard work of systematization to be done by Trubetzkoy and the phonologists of the Prague Linguistic Circle; the consequences of the "zero sign," alluded to fleetingly in the Cours, had to be drawn by Jakobson in the 1930s; the definition that makes language "a form and not a substance" is surrounded in the Cours by such muddled uses of the terms "form" and "substance" that it took Hjelmslev's glossematic approach to sort out the issue into the tetrad of form/substance // content/expression. 1 And even worse, we often catch Saussure in flagrant contradiction with his own theories. As Jacques Derrida commented in 1967, it is often necessary "to read Saussure against Saussure." 2 And as Derrida went on to note, Saussure's authorship is something of a public fiction: "it is not unthinkable that one day the wording of the Course… will take on a suspect appearance in the light of unpublished materials now in preparation…. Up to what point is Saussure responsible for the Course compiled and issued after his death? The question is not a new one." 3 When we read Saussure against Saussure, it is tempting to imagine that the real Saussure has been ill-served by his editors. As most readers should know, the Bally and Sechehaye text of 1916 "synchronically" (!) merges three
On the structure of complex words: the morphology-sintax interplay
Anuario Del Seminario De Filologia Vasca Julio De Urquijo, 2013
This paper is mainly devoted to discuss some topics concerning the organization of morphology and to show some of the theoretical and empirical advantages of a syntactic approach to word formation processes over the standard lexicalist approach. It is argued that complex. word formation 'obeys the same general principles that apply at each level of the' syntactic component, and that the differences between morphological and syntactic operations can be derived from the interaction of general conditions of the system. This move from the lexicalist approach to a syntactic view of morphology is possible due to two independent factors that have combined within the linguistic theory only in the last few years: on the one hand, the development of morphology th~ory itself has made evident a large number of regulariti~s in those processes that, I think, were misconceived in earlier stages of the inquiry; these properties manifest a highly complex organization of the morphological component and its relationship with other components of the grammar. On the other hand, a rather productiye development of comparative linguistics within what has been called, the Principles and Parameters approach has permitted a considerable extension in the range of linguistic studies on a variety of languages that show very different morphological and syntactic patterns. This new material reveals a considerable number of general properties that systematically appear in morphological processes even across languages that superficIally appear to be very different.
The paper presents a model of morphosemantic patterns based on the model of Guiraud’s morphosemantic fields. The main reason for introducing this model into the description of the architecture of the Croatian lexicon is the fact that Croatian is a morphologically rich language, in which grammatical and semantic mechanisms interact in lexical organization. The model of morphosemantic patterns at this stage of its development consists of two basic models: the model of morphosemantic fields and the model of morphosemantic grounds. Although the model is based on structuralist tenets, it is our intention to demonstrate how it is related to some of the most prominent contemporary theoretical frameworks, namely Cognitive Linguistics and Construction Grammar, especially Construction Morphology.