Morphological Theory and Creole Languages

This chapter explores the interaction between creole morphology and morphological theory by drawing on empirical evidence which illustrates that morphological similarities exist between creoles and non-creoles. Such evidence shows that morphological patterns in creoles may be used for the creation of new lexemes (through word-formation), that morphosyntactic features may be mapped onto existing lexemes (by means of inflection), or that derived words in creoles may be semantically non-compositional while inflected words may exhibit form–meaning mismatches and be part of non-predictable paradigms. Conceptually, the morphological evidence will be used to claim that creole word structure is just as principled as the morphology of non-creole languages, and that it can be naturally accounted for by applying the same formal apparatus that is used for the analysis of non-creole languages.

Minimalism in Morphological Theories

This chapter reviews the main theories and proposals that in current debates have received a substantial influence from the so-called Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995). This research program has been reflected in different types of morphological theories through three main properties: (i) a change in focus from the internal rules of combination of heads to the interface properties of morphological structures and the influence that third factor considerations have on them; (ii) a trend to derive, rather than to postulate as a lexical property, as many properties of morphological objects as possible, and (iii) a trend to remove from the computational system some classical morphological properties, such as agreement, in order to associate them to the externalization component of grammar.

Word and Paradigm Morphology

There has been a broad resurgence in word-based approaches and the reconceptualization of classical ‘word and paradigm’ (WP) approaches as general models of morphological analysis. WP models are well adapted to the description and analysis of complex morphological patterns, most transparently clear in inflection. Modern WP models demonstrate how morphological organization is fundamentally implicational: the central role of words (and paradigms) reflects their predictive value in a morphological system. Understanding the nature of morphological organization, within and across languages, requires exploration of the fundamental elements of implicational relations. Descriptively this involves identifying the internal structure of words and the ways this structure facilitates an external organization into patterns of relatedness. Theoretically, it is necessary to identify analytic tools appropriate for specifying and quantifying word-internal and word-external organization. This type of analytic approach encourages the investigation of the types of learning theories that may play a role in determining the patterns observed to occur and thereby help to explain their learnability.

Morphological Theory and Diachronic Change

Variation and change are essential for any human language, but at the same time they form a challenge for theoretical models of grammar. This chapter discusses some notions and phenomena encountered in word-formation change that should be relevant to any morphological theory. It focuses on the notion of reanalysis and on phenomena related to this notion. In its second half, the chapter focuses on the notion of productivity and on the view that every change in word-formation has to be seen as a change in productivity. It is claimed that theoretical models will need to become more attentive to usage-based perspectives in order to integrate the dynamics of language and language change. The examples used for illustration purposes in this chapter are taken from Dutch, German, and English.

Word Grammar Morphology

This chapter presents an overview of the Word Grammar theory of morphology. Word Grammar is a theory of language structure which has been in development since the early 1980s, with robust results especially in syntax and lexical semantics. Word Grammar has developed analyses of various morphological phenomena, from clitics to Semitic infixation, all within a theory which articulates clearly with other domains of grammar, such as syntax, and which has a well-developed account of the relationship between language and human cognition. Word Grammar is a cognitive, declarative model, which dispenses with covert elements and movement; the morphological dimensions of the theory are in the Word and Paradigm tradition.

Morphological Theory and Typology

Morphology, by its very language-specific nature, poses conceptual, methodological, and empirical problems for both linguistic theory and language typology. This chapter offers an overview of major issues in morphological typology, starting with the controversial definitions of basic notions such as ‘wordform’ and ‘lexeme’, and proceeding to the classification of morphological phenomena along the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes. It is argued that traditional dichotomies such as ‘inflection’ vs. ‘derivation’ or ‘agglutination’ vs. ‘flexion’ are to by replaced by multidimensional classifications based on a broad empirical coverage of morphological phenomena attested in human languages, and that only through a mutually informed fruitful interaction of typologists and morphological theorists can an adequate cross-linguistically valid and analytically sophisticated model of morphology be attained.

Early Generative Grammar

In the earliest stages of transformational-generative grammar, there was no lexicon and the rewrite rules and transformations aimed to generate the correct sequence of morphemes of a sentence. The introduction of the lexicon was based on empirical considerations, but not in the domain of morphology. Chomsky’s Lexicalist Hypothesis places word formation in the lexicon, but not inflection. Elaborating on these ideas, Halle (1973) lays the foundation for morpheme-based approaches and Jackendoff (1975) for word-based approaches to word formation. In Generative Semantics, semantic structure is the basis for generation and word formation is integrated with lexical insertion. Levi (1978) proposes Recoverably Deletable Predicates to restrict the power of the transformations involved in compounding.

Distributed Morphology

This chapter surveys the key principles of the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993, 1994). This summary distinguishes itself from other such summaries by focusing primarily on DM’s morphological properties rather than its syntactic ones. Thus it focuses on morphological concerns such as the morpheme-based hypothesis, realizational morphology, morphological rules, segmentability, derivation vs. inflection, underspecification, productivity, blocking, allomorphy, and the interfaces of morphology with syntax and phonology. This chapter emphasizes metatheoretical concerns that would be of interest to students of comparative morphological theory with a significant focus on the strengths and weaknesses of Distributed Morphology as a theory of morphology. Secondary focus is also given to internal metatheoretic debates such as the status of roots in the grammar and the power of post-syntactic rules.

A Short History of Morphological Theory

The original distinction, in the opposing views of René and Ferdinand de Saussure, between views of word structure based on the combination of elementary, atomic signs (or ‘morphemes’) on the one hand and relations between complex words on the other, is reviewed. Early work in American linguistics associated with Boas and Sapir is noted, and the later emergence of clearly morpheme-based views in the Bloomfieldian tradition (especially as continued by Harris, Hockett, and others) is reviewed. This picture was essentially taken over unchanged in early generative grammar, although Chomsky (1965) provided (now forgotten) arguments in favor of an alternate non-morphemic view. The re-emergence of interest in morphology in later work has led to a situation in which the two views that can be identified originally in the work of the de Saussure brothers continue to characterize two conflicting scholarly positions.

Structuralism

During the twentieth century, much of linguistic research shifted in focus from diachronic to synchronic description. The challenge of expanding the database of languages well beyond Indo-European brought about the need to describe languages on their own terms instead of importing alien preconceptions and expectations. Alongside the growth in language resources, there was also a need among practitioners to establish a coherent and reliable set of analytical concepts and methods for synchronic research. This chapter surveys these developments and highlights the enduring relevance of the work.