Sunday 30 October 2016

The Limits Of Compositional Structure

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 9):
Grammarians used to worry a lot about whether to analyse sat, came as consisting of two morphemes (sit/come plus an abstract morpheme ‘past’ realised as a vowel change); but this is a problem created by the theory. Composition is an important semogenic (meaning–creating) resource; but it should not be allowed to dominate our thinking about grammar.