Identifying meaningful elements within words
The kinds of reasoning can be used to identify parts of words as well. Consider, for example, the following data from the Isthmus Zapotec language of Mexico (Merrifield et al. 1987, prob. 9):
(7) kañee ‘feet’ kaʒgi ‘chins’
ñeebe ‘his foot’ ʒigibe ‘his chin’
kañeebe ‘his feet’
ñeeluʔ ‘your foot’ ʒigiluʔ ‘your chin’
kañeetu ‘your (pl) feet’ kaʒigitu ‘your (pl) chins’
kañeedu ‘our feet’ kaʒigidu ‘our chins’
All of the words which contain the string/ñee/ have GLOSSES (translations) which involve the idea ‘foot,’ and all of the words which contain the string /ʒigi/ have glosses which contain the English word ‘chin.’ So the method of recurring partials allows us to identify the form ñee as meaning ‘foot’ and the form ʒigi as meaning ‘chin.’ Further data show that these forms, ñee and ʒigi, can occur as independent words in their own right.
We also notice that whenever the word begins with the sequence ka–, the English translation equivalent uses a plural form of the noun; so (again by the method of recurring partials) we might guess that ka– is a marker of plurality. This hypothesis can be confirmed by finding minimal pairs in (8). Why doesn’t example (7) contain a form meaning ‘his chins?’ How would you say it if you needed to?
(8) ñee ‘foot’ ñeebe ‘his foot’ ʒigi ‘chin’
kañee ‘feet’ kañeebe ‘his feet’ kaʒigi ‘chins’
We can also use minimal contrasts to identify elements corresponding to the possessive pronouns in the English gloss. The forms–be ‘his’,–tu ‘your (plural)’, and-du ‘our’ occur in identical environments, as shown in (9), providing a minimally contrastive set.
(9) kañeebe ‘his feet’
kañeetu ‘your (pl) feet’
kañeedu ‘our feet’
There is a fourth ending, –luʔ, which seems to mean ‘your (singular).’ This ending is not shown in (9) because we do not have an example of it occurring in that precise context. That is, the data set (or CORPUS) does not contain the form kañeeluʔ ‘your feet’, although we would predict that this form could occur, based on the patterning of elements in other forms. As far as we can tell, this “gap” in the data is purely accidental, a result of how the examples were collected or arranged rather than a systematic fact about the language. The existence of forms like kaʒikeluʔ ‘your shoulders’ (compare ʒike ‘shoulder’, ʒikebe ‘his shoulder’) shows that–luʔ can co-occur with ka–.
Even though we have no example of– luʔ in the precise frame used in(9), the corpus contains other minimal contrasts which confirm its meaning:
(10) ñee ‘foot’ ʒigi ‘chin’
ñeeluʔ ‘your foot’ ʒigiluʔ ‘your chin’
