Word-Building

(Paper presented at the 9th Annual NEIU Faculty Symposium in Chicago, IL. This includes only the presentation itself.)

Affixes are commonly described in relation to which edge of a stem they adjoin to: prefixes adjoin to the leftmost edge of a stem, suffixes, adjoin to the rightmost edge of a stem, transfixes appear at both edges, etc. Languages with templatic morphology are ones where the order of affixes appears to be unmotivated (i.e., not driven by syntactic, phonological, or semantic rules). Kasak (2019) argues, however, that the order of these affixes is not completely unmotivated, as they are motivated by the morphology itself. By appealing to Anderson's (1992) notion of composite words, we can posit that there is an intermediate class of word complexity called a composite, where a single word appears within the domain of another word with additional morphological material that is not itself a word. Templatic morphology allows affixes to target multiple edges within the greater word, rather than just the most extreme leftmost or rightmost edges. As such, a morphological item like a suffix is not defined by its tendency to be found at the rightmost edge of the overall word, per se, but by its requirement to be at some right edge within a word.

THE -LAR/-LAR- WORD-BUILDING FORMANT IN THE BULGARIAN TOPONYMIC SYSTEM The -lar/-lar- formant (from the Turkic -lar) is sparsely represented in the Bulgarian word-building system. In the languages from which it derives, this morpheme's function is connected to the building of plurals. The -lar/-lar- formant in Bulgarian has had its grammatical functions completely eliminated. It only occurs in certain obsolete or dialect words, and in a small number of toponyms. It had a significantly higher use frequency in toponymy in the not-distant past, which is largely connected to sociolinguistic and extralinguistic factors.

О русском аффиксе О/Е написано много, однако статус его так и остается недостаточно определенным. В большом числе публикаций его называют «соединительной гласной», что вообще лишает его морфологического статуса, или превращает в морфологического чебурашку. Есть работы, в которых ему отказывается в значении, и, наконец, в большой части посвященных ему работ его называют интерфиксом. В этой статье будут затронуты некоторые проблемы, касающиеся таксономического статуса аффикса, его фонологии, морфонологии, синтактики и семантики.