تسجيل الدخول

تسجيل

Phonological autonomy and dependence

المؤلف:  Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green

المصدر:  Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction

الجزء والصفحة:  C17-P590

2026-02-22

383

Phonological autonomy and dependence

In keeping with cognitive assumptions (recall our discussion of the Generalisation Commitment in Chapter 2), Langacker (2002: 291) does not assume a ‘sharp dichotomy’ between inflectional and derivational grammatical morphemes. In Cognitive Grammar, grammatical morphemes are maximally specific at the phonological pole, which means that they are specified for phonetic content. This is because the schema for PLURAL NOUN (or THING), for example, will have a relatively stable phonological realisation (regular plural nouns in English end in some allophone of-s), while the schema for NOUN (or THING) does not have a predictable phonological form. In Cognitive Grammar, affixes and non-segmental morphemes (for example, tones) are described as phonologically dependent. A root is the smallest phonologically autonomous unit within a composite structure, and a stem is defined as ‘an autonomous phonological structure at any level within a word’ (Langacker 1987: 345). For example, in the word character-istic-ally, character is the root as well as the stem to which -istic is affixed, and characteristic in turn forms the stem to which -ally is affixed. It is worth pointing out that Langacker’s definintions of the terms ‘root’ and ‘stem’ differ significantly from how these terms are traditionally defined (see, for example, Trask 1993, and compare the term ‘base’).