74 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 191 



number and types of items that may be introduced into an utterance 

 at a morpheme boundary is taken as an indication that the boundary 

 is an infraword boundary. The boundary between a verb core and 

 a following plural subject suffix, for instance, is of this type. The 

 only items that may be introduced at this point are aspect and/or 

 benefactive morphemes, neither of which ever occurs except following 

 a verb core. 



A morpheme boundary at which a wide variety of items may be 

 introduced, on the other hand, is regarded as a word boundary. 

 Although a verbal auxiliary is closely linked to a preceding verb core 

 and is meaningless in isolation, it is, nevertheless, a separate word 

 according to the above criterion. Not only may a number of suffixes 

 occur following the verb core and preceding the auxiliary, but also 

 items which, on the basis of distributional criteria, are themselves 

 free words may be introduced at this point. 



Words may be exhaustively segmented into morphemes. The 

 term is used here in the sense generally used in American descriptive 

 linguistics and includes word roots as well as various kinds of deriva- 

 tional and inflectional affixes and clitics. Clitics in Santa Ana 

 Keresan are morphemes which, following the distributional criteria 

 for marking word boundaries, are parts of words. They differ from 

 affixes in that they are not so closely linked phonologically to the 

 rest of the word. Specifically, they do not cause morphophonemic 

 voicing of a preceding voiceless vowel and are much more likely than 

 are affixes to be separated from the rest of the word by a pause. 



WORD CLASSES 



Three major word classes are distinguished on the basis of their 

 internal structure. Of these, the verbs and the verbal auxiliaries 

 occur with inflectional affixes. The third major word class is composed 

 of all uninflected words. 



Three principal levels of internal structuring are recognized in 

 words: inflection, stem formation, and derivation. The terms inflec- 

 tion and inflectional affixes are used only with reference to those affixes 

 which are external to the stem. Stem formation involves the combina- 

 tion of a thematic adjunct with a core and may include the addition of 

 a benefactive suffix as well. The term derivation is used with reference 

 to the internal structuring of certain verb cores and of some words of 

 the uninflected class. Although clitics are, by definition, parts of 

 words rather than free words, they are disregarded in the following 

 description of word structure and are reserved for separate considera- 

 tion. 



