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Semantic Components in Kechua Person Morphemes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

William L. Wonderly
William L. Wonderly*
Affiliation:
Summer Institute of Linguistics
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The term sememe was defined by Bloomfield as ‘the meaning of a morpheme’. Inasmuch as any language is a semiotic system in which continuous reality is arbitrarily classified into discrete categories that correspond to speech forms, it is useful to maintain this definition. By doing so we have the morpheme as the minimal unit of meaningful speech form (Saussure's signifiant) and the sememe as the minimal unit of discretely classified reality (Saussure's signifié) corresponding to it.

Information

Type
Abstract
Information
Language , Volume 28 , Issue 3-Part1: July-September , September 1952 , pp. 366 - 376
Copyright
Copyright © 1952 Linguistic Society of America

References

1 The Kechua materials in §§1–5 of this paper represent the Ayacucho dialect of Peru; their structure was worked out in essentially the present form by the author in collaboration with Kenneth G. Case of the Evangelical Union of South America, during the 1948 session of the Summer Institute of Linguistics at the University of Oklahoma. Case, who has worked for a number of years in the Ayacucho area, provided the material and a rough analysis, and concurred in the basic features of the present analysis. Most of the conclusions of this paper were read at the summer meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in July 1950. Since that date, Masako Yokoyama has published a morphemic analysis of a different Kechua dialect, that of Cuzco; see fn. 12 below. Her treatment of the person morphemes differs considerably from ours; we have attempted to correlate her analysis with ours in §6 of this paper.

2 Leonard Bloomfield, Language 162, 264 (New York, 1933).

3 Cf. Martin Joos, Description of language design, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 22.701–08 (1950).

4 Cf. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, Part 1, Chap. 1 (Paris, 1922).

5 This term implies an analogy with Harris's simultaneous components in phonology; see Lg. 20.181–205 (1944).

6 What is here called a semantic component common to two or more morphemes of a paradigm, C. F. Voegelin has aptly termed ‘paradigmatic meaning’; cf. Linguistically marked distinctions in meaning, Proceedings of the 29th Congress of Americanists (1950).

7 John Lotz, The semantic analysis of the nominal bases in Hungarian, Travaux du Cercle linguistique de Copenhague 5.185 ff. (1949).

8 Thomas A. Sebeok, Finnish and Hungarian case systems: Their form and function 32 (Acta Instituti Hungarici Universitatis Holmiensis, Series B, Linguistica 3; Stockholm, 1946).

9 Lewis Carroll, Through the looking glass, chap. 6: ‘... “slithy” means “lithe and slimy”. ... it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word ...‘

10 Charles F. Hockett, Problems of morphemic analysis, Lg. 23.321–43 (1947).

11 Cited by Eugene A. Nida, The identification of morphemes, Lg. 24.414–41 (1948); see also A system for the description of semantic elements, Word 7.1–14 (1951).

12 Outline of Kechua structure: I. Morphology, Lg. 27.38–67 (1951).

13 Henceforth we abbreviate Cuzco Cz, Ayacucho Ay.