Amalgams, may make it difficult, in many cases, to decide which phonic segments is to be ascribed to a functional, and which to a modifier. But formally, the two types are fundamentally different. The distinction is not, as Sapir has it, between material content and relation, but between functional monemes and non-functional ones, the latter including the bulk of what Sapir puts under ‘material content’, namely lexicon, including elements of composition and derivation, together with our modifier.
- Martinet (1962), a pag.97