Joe:
#And Rosta wrote:
#> I don't know enough to know of clear exx of circumfixes,
#
#The xrefer entry for "circumfix" gives an example:
#
#circumfix
#
#A combined prefix and suffix, treated as a single unit. E.g. in
#German gefragt 'asked', the forms which mark the participle,
#ge- and -t, might be seen as a circumfix (ge...t) enclosing
#the root frag-. Cf. parasynthetic (2).
#
#http://www.xrefer.com/entry/570801 

Yes, but it's not a very clear case of a circumfix. I don't know enough
German morphology to attack it, but the alternative analysis would
be that what we have here is a prefix and suffix (or prefix and
inflected form) that must cooccur. That wouldn't be an example of
a discontinuous morpheme. But never mind, infixes do create
discontinuous morphemes, so the existence of the latter is not in
doubt.

#> but infixation and intercalational morphology seems to
#> necessarily involve discontinuity.
#>
#> But is the existence of discontinuous constituents really
#> well-known? I don't know of any standard examples.
#
#Certain cases of extraposition, I think.

In English? Do you remember what?

#> As for discontinuous words, I think it's impossible, because
#> I think words have no duration.
#
#You mean that they just single nodes on a tree (is that your
#definition?).

Well, yes, I would take syntactic words to be terminal nodes
of the semanticosyntactic tree. I say they have no duration
because (a) this helps to explain how more than one 
semanticosyntactic word  can be 'enounced' by one
morphophonoloigcal word, but only if the SS words are
adjacent, (b) I can't think of reasons for SS words to
have duration, (c) SS words have no subparts, (d) I 
take SS words (& phrases0 to be schemas for 
ideational/cognitive interpretation (with MP words/phrases 
being schmeas for phonetic interpretation), and I can't 
imagine how an act of ideational/cognitive interpretation 
with no subpartts -- i.e. a SS word -- could have duration
(let alone be discontinuous.).

--And.