Talk:Disfix

Disfixation in French

Would any linguists here consider French (b)oeuf (pron. [(b)œf]) to undergo disfixation when pluralizing to (b)oeufs (pron. [(b)ø])? (The closing of œ to ø is a regular alternation owing to the syllable becoming open.)--Atemperman (talk) 16:44, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

I would, if that were a regular occurrence. That is, if French regularly formed the plural by dropping a final consonant, that would be a disfix. But in this case, it might be best to simply say that those two words are irregular.

Perhaps one could argue that masculines are derived from feminines thru disfixation: blɑ̃ʃ → blɑ̃, bɔn → bɔ̃, etc. That's a much more general pattern, but I've never heard anyone make that claim. — kwami (talk) 17:01, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

The French example actually shows how disfixation could potentially arise. In this case, a regular sound change deleted many consonants before /s/, and then final /s/ (but often not /f/) was dropped. Benwing (talk) 07:05, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

An American structural linguist (possibly Leonard Bloomfield or Charles Hockett) once analyzed the feminines as being the basic form, leading to mostly negative reactions from French quasi-linguists at the time... AnonMoos (talk) 07:42, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

I've added it in. The criticism I ref'd is that it is not productive in French, but rote suppletion. However, much of regular morphology is learned by rote rather than being derived online, even when entirely productive: it may be productive because a familiar pattern is extended, not because there is actual any derivation of morphemes. But that's a cognitive theoretical problem a bit beyond the scope of this article. — kwami (talk) 10:46, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

How about the genitive plural of many nouns (2nd decl. and neuters in -o) in Russian? For example nom. sg. lampa -> gen. pl. lamp. One would hardly declare the genitive plural the basic form and the nominative singular derived. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 02:06, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

Deriving French masculines by subtracting final consonants from French feminines

According to Bernard Tranel Concreteness in Generative Phonology: Evidence from French ISBN 0-520-04165-8, p. 163, the idea was proposed by Leonard Bloomfield in 1933 (p. 217 of his Language textbook) and by Zellig Harris in 1951 (Structural Linguistics pp. 168-169). It's not the standard analysis, but it's an idea that various linguists have toyed with from time to time, and is reasonably well-known in certain professional linguistic circles. AnonMoos (talk) 01:51, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, and we note that it isn't true disfixation, but rather a pattern similar to disfixation. It's also from one of the few such languages that most readers have any hope of being familiar with. Restored. — kwami (talk) 19:53, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Murle examples should not be analyzed as subtractive morphology

I just removed the Murle data since they are not actually examples of the use of a disfix. Murle, like the other Surmic languages sometimes uses singulative suffixes, generally -t and -n. This pattern of languages using singulative suffixes with T and N was described by Margaret Bryan many years ago:

• Bryan, Margaret. 1959. The T/K languages: A new substratum. Africa 29:1-21.
• Bryan, Margaret. 1968. The *N/*K languages of Africa. Journal of African Languages 7:169-217.