Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 April 2026
Most linguists agree on the existence, or at least on the inescapable utility, of two kinds of basic elements in a language: morphemes and phonemes. The relation between them, however, is conceived of in various ways. In this paper we survey some of these ways, and then extend the discussion to some other aspects of language design and of linguistic method and theory.
1 Leonard Bloomfield, A set of postulates for the science of language, Lg. 2.153–64 (1926). Reprinted in RiL = Martin Joos, ed., Readings in linguistics (Washington, 1957).
2 For efforts along this line, or justifications therefor, see Noam Chomsky, Morris Halle, and Fred Lukoff, On accent and juncture in English, For Roman Jakobson 65–80 (The Hague, 1956); and Robert B. Lees, review of Chomsky's Syntactic structures, Lg. 33.375–407 (1957).
3 Morris Swadesh and Carl F. Voegelin, A problem in phonological alternation, Lg. 15.1–10 (1939); reprinted in RiL.
4 Zellig S. Harris, Morpheme alternants in linguistic analysis, Lg. 18.169–80 (1942); reprinted in RiL.
5 A term introduced by me in Problems of morphemic analysis, Lg. 23.321–43 (1947); reprinted in RiL.
6 Floyd Lounsbury, The method of descriptive morphology: the introductory chapter of his Oneida verb morphology 11–24 (Yale University publications in Anthropology, No. 48; 1953); reprinted in RiL.
7 Discussed in Chapter 33 of my Course in modern linguistics (New York, 1958).
8 It is especially fashionable at present to use the term ‘grammar’ in a wider sense than is intended here: the whole design of a language, or a theory or description of that whole design. Except in a few obvious places in the last section of this paper, my use of the term is in the narrow sense, excluding phonology and morphophonemics—what at one time I was calling ‘tactics’ (e.g. op.cit. fn. 5 above).
9 I have in mind here especially A. A. Hill's procedures in his Introduction to linguistic structures (New York, 1958).
10 Op.cit. fn. 5 above.
11 The vital distinction between what are here called components and features was clarified for me during informal talks with George L. Trager in the spring of 1958. Historically, the stimulus of these talks was the impetus for this whole paper.
12 In many phonological descriptions that use the word ‘syllable’, that term seems actually to refer to a kind of element found naturally on the phonic stratum, finding its phonological counterparts only because the analyst evokes relation R. This is then the converse of the situation described in the preceding paragraph.
13 Some of the languages of the northern Caucasus seem to be of this sort; see, for example, W. S. Allen, Structure and system in the Abaza verbal complex, Transactions of the Philological Society 1956.127–76.
14 Zellig S. Harris, From phoneme to morpheme, Lg. 31.190–222 (1955).
15 So far as I know, the first mention of this in print is in Zellig S. Harris, Methods in structural linguistics (Chicago, 1951).
16 The passage is from a paper of mine, Logical considerations in the analysis of animal communication, to be published.
17 Cenemes are the generic analog of phonological units in a language. For example, in telegraphy the cenemes are the dots, dashes, and pauses of several lengths.
18 This interplay was of course discovered by the historical linguists of the nineteenth century. It constitutes part of the empirical evidence for the duality hypothesis.
19 An earlier diagram: in my Manual of phonology (Bloomington, 1955).
20 This is, in my opinion, the defect in the investigations referred to above in fn. 2.
21 George L. Trager and Henry L. Smith Jr., Outline of English structure (SIL, OP 3, 1951); and a great deal of subsequent work, not yet in print.
22 Noam Chomsky, Syntactic structures 49–60 ('s-Gravenhage, 1957).
23 As Chomsky suggests in his review of Greenberg's Essays in linguistics, Word 15.202–18 (1959).
24 Compare Chomsky, Syntactic structures §5.5.