Morphophonemics as semiotic

Abstract

1. One might easily choose to identify the beginnings of generative grammar with the appearance of Roman Jakobson's ‘Russian conjugation’ (1948). 1 The research reported hereunder was supported in part by a grant from the Penrose Fund of the American Philosophical Society, National Science Foundation Grant GS-2327, and a Slavic and East European Studies grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. The notational and abbreviational conventions utilized include the following: italicized foreign items are in transliteration, unitalicized in morphophonemic transcription, except that grammatical morphemes (stems, suffixes, desinences) are italicized in the absence of braces in the text; the raised comma in Russian forms signifies palatalization; the doublecross (#) represents a vowel alternating with zero; INA = inapplicable; grave stress (') means a vowel that is never stressed; a slash between Russian forms divides the nominative or accusative singular (to the left of the slash) from the genitive singular (to the right of the slash, as a representative of the oblique case endings); adj = adjective, pej = pejorative, dim = diminutive, aug = augmentative, nom = nominative, gen = genitive, ins = instrumental. Abandoning the traditional two stem treatment of the Russian verb, Jakobson showed that all surface forms could be derived from a single stem (with some exceptions) by the application of certain morphophonemic rules, most prominent among which was the RULE OF TRUNCATION. This rule dictates the deletion of stem final vowels before desinence initial vowels and stem final consonants before desinence initial consonants; conversely, sequences of vowel plus consonant and vice versa are maintained intact. Thus in Jakobson's ‘one stem system’ (as it came to be called) both govorjú ‘I talk’ and govoril ‘he talked’ are derived from a basic stem govor'í-:

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