Morphological phrasemes and Totonacan verbal morphology

Abstract

The existence of restricted or phraseologized complex expressions such as clichés, collocations, and idioms (collectively known as phrasemes) is well-known and widely accepted in the domain of multi-word expressions. What is not so widely recognized is the existence of the same type of phraseologized expression at the morphological level — restricted complex morphological expressions, or morphological phrasemes. Morphological phrasemes, found in both derivation and inflection, are governed by the same principles of phraseologization that govern phrasemes at the lexical-syntactic level, and have roughly the same subtypes, including morphological collocations and morphological idioms. In addition to offering clear advantages in terms of useful descriptive practice and formal economy, the recognition of phraseologized morphological expressions makes clear the parallels between linguistic signs at the lexical and morphemic level, this isomorphism falling out from the conventionalized nature of the mapping between linguistic meaning and linguistic form. Contrary to many current approaches to morphological theory that reject the morpheme as a meaning-bearing element in the structure of words, this paper argues that the existence of conventionalized uses of sublexical elements gives strong support to the utility of the morpheme as unit of linguistic analysis.