The terms "disfix" and "disfixation" were proposed by Hardy and Timothy Montler in a 1988 paper on the morphology of the Alabama language. The process had been previously described by Leonard Bloomfield who called it a minus feature, and Zellig Harris who called it a "minus morpheme". Other terms for the same or similar processes are subtraction, truncation, deletion, and minus formation.
In Muskogean, disfixes mark pluractionality. In the Alabama language, there are two principal forms of this morpheme:
In most verbs, the last two segments are dropped from the syllable of the stem, which is the final syllable of the root. If the syllable has only two segments, it is elided altogether. For example:
In some verbs, the final consonant of the penult is dropped, but the preceding vowel lengthens to compensate:
French
Bloomfield described the process of disfixation through an example from French although most contemporary analyses find this example to be inadequate because the masculine forms might be taken as the base form and the feminine forms simply as suppletives. Though not productive like Muscogean and therefore not true disfixation, some French plurals are analysed as derived from the singular, and many masculine words from the feminine by dropping the final consonant and making some generally predictable changes to the vowel:
Historically, this reflects that the masculine was once pronounced similar to the current feminine, and the feminine formed by adding. The modern situation results from regular apocope which removed a consonant from the masculine and the final schwa of the feminine.
