Morphology (linguistics)
Prosodic word vs. morphological word

Here are examples from other languages of the failure of a single phonological word to coincide with a single morphological word form. In Latin, one way to express the concept of ' NOUN-PHRASE and NOUN-PHRASE ' (as in "apples and oranges") is to suffix '-que' to the second noun phrase: "apples oranges-and". An extreme level of the theoretical quandary posed by some phonological words is provided by the Kwak'wala language. In Kwak'wala, as in a great many other languages, meaning relations between nouns, including possession and "semantic case", are formulated by affixes, instead of by independent "words". The three-word English phrase, "with his club", in which 'with' identifies its dependent noun phrase as an instrument and 'his' denotes a possession relation, would consist of two words or even one word in many languages. Unlike most other languages, Kwak'wala semantic affixes phonologically attach not to the lexeme they pertain to semantically but to the preceding lexeme. Consider the following example (in Kwak'wala, sentences begin with what corresponds to an English verb):

kwixʔid-i-da

clubbed- PIVOT - DETERMINER

bəgwanəma -χ-a

man- ACCUSATIVE - DETERMINER

q'asa-s-is

otter- INSTRUMENTAL - 3SG - POSSESSIVE

t'alwagwayu

club

kwixʔid-i-da bəgwanəma -χ-a q'asa-s-is t'alwagwayu

clubbed-PIVOT-DETERMINER man-ACCUSATIVE-DETERMINER otter-INSTRUMENTAL-3SG-POSSESSIVE club

"the man clubbed the otter with his club."

That is, to a speaker of Kwak'wala, the sentence does not contain the "words" 'him-the-otter' or 'with-his-club' Instead, the markers - i-da (PIVOT -'the'), referring to "man", attaches not to the noun bəgwanəma ("man") but to the verb; the markers - χ-a (ACCUSATIVE -'the'), referring to otter, attach to bəgwanəma instead of to q'asa ('otter'), etc. In other words, a speaker of Kwak'wala does not perceive the sentence to consist of these phonological words:

kwixʔid

clubbed

i-da-bəgwanəma

PIVOT -the-man

χ-a-q'asa

hit-the-otter

s-is -t'alwagwayu

with-his -club

kwixʔid i-da-bəgwanəma χ-a-q'asa s-is -t'alwagwayu

clubbed PIVOT-the-man hit-the-otter with-his -club

A central publication on this topic is the volume edited by Dixon and Aikhenvald (2002), examining the mismatch between prosodic-phonological and grammatical definitions of "word" in various Amazonian, Australian Aboriginal, Caucasian, Eskimo, Indo-European, Native North American, West African, and sign languages. Apparently, a wide variety of languages make use of the hybrid linguistic unit clitic, possessing the grammatical features of independent words but the prosodic -phonological lack of freedom of bound morphemes. The intermediate status of clitics poses a considerable challenge to linguistic theory.
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