The submorphemic conjecture in English: Towards a distributed model of the cognitive dynamics of submorphemes

The question of lexical submorphemics has long been controversial in English lexical studies and in general (Genette 1976, Jakobson 1980, Toussaint 1983). The linguistic sign is traditionally considered as “arbitrary”: the phonological form is not iconic and does not reflect the physical properties of the object or event to which the word refers; for lack of motivation there are as many words as languages for one given item (snow, neige in French, elur in Basque, erc’h in Breton) and no human community produces “ideal” signs as is done by Adam in the Genesis or by the logothete according to Cratyle. On the other hand, a minority of authors is convinced that some areas of the English lexicon are organized by a paradigm of submorphemic markers: clusters of more than one phoneme, and occasionally isolated phonemes, which appear to attach the lexical notion to a specific semantic field.