Distributed morphology

Abstract: A minimalist programme for linguistic theory, Noam Chomsky on argument structure and the lexical expression of syntactic relations, Kenneth Hale and Samuel Jay Keyser distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection, Morris Halle and Alex Marantz integrity of prosodic constituents and the domain of syllabification rules in Spanish and Catalan, Hames W. Harris interrogatives, James Higginbotham triggering science forming capacity through linguistic inquiry, Maya Honda and Wayne O'Neil evidence for metrical constituency, Michael Kenstowicz.

Abstract: In Localism versus Globalism in Morphology and Phonology, David Embick offers the first detailed examination of morphology and phonology from a phase-cyclic point of view (that is, one that takes into account recent developments in Distributed Morphology and the Minimalist program) and the only recent detailed treatment of allomorphy, a phenomenon that is central to understanding how the grammar of human language works. In addition to making new theoretical proposals about morphology and phonology in terms of a cyclic theory, Embick addresses a schism in the field between phonological theories such as Optimality Theory and other (mostly syntactic) theories such as those associated with the Minimalist program. He presents sustained empirical arguments that the Localist view of grammar associated with the Minimalist program (and Distributed Morphology in particular) is correct, and that the Globalism espoused by many forms of Optimality Theory is incorrect. In the "derivational versus nonderivational" debate in linguistic theory, Embick's arguments come down squarely on the derivational side. Determining how to make empirical comparisons between such large positions, and the different frameworks that embody them, is at the heart of the book. Embick argues that patterns of allomorphy implicate general questions about locality and specific questions about the manner in which (morpho)syntax relates to (morpho)phonology. Allomorphy thus provides a crucial test case for comparing Localist and Globalist approaches to grammar.

Abstract: A theory of the syntax/morphology interface is first, a theory of how ‘words’ and their internal structure – the traditional domain of morphology – relate to the structures generated by the syntax, and second, a theory of how the rules for deriving complex words relate to the rules for deriving syntactic structures. A prominent line of research in this area consists of approaches assuming some version of the Lexicalist Hypothesis. For present purposes, this is the claim that (at least some) words are special in ways that e.g. phrases are not, and that this ‘specialness’ calls for an architecture in which the derivation of words and the derivation of syntactic objects occur in different modules of the grammar (the Lexicon versus the syntax).1 While the ‘words’ derived in the Lexicon serve as the terminals in the syntactic derivation, there is a sharp division between syntax and morphology according to Lexicalist approaches of this type. In this way, the interface between syntax and morphology in such a theory is opaque or indirect: there is no reason to expect the structure and composition of ‘words’ to relate to the structure and composition of syntactic objects in any transparent or for that matter systematic fashion. A second line of research advances the hypothesis that ‘words’ are assembled by rules of the syntax. Thus the ‘word’ is not a privileged derivational object as far as the architecture of the grammar is concerned, since all complex objects, whether words and phrases, are treated as the output of the same generative system (the syntax). According to this view, which we assume here, the theory of the syntax/morphology interface might better be said to be a theory of (1) the primitive elements of the syntactic derivation (the traditional question of the morpheme); (2) the principles governing the assembly of these primitives into complex objects (the question of what structures the syntax and perhaps PF rules can derive); and (3) the manner in which phonological forms relate to the primitives and to the complex objects constructed from the primitives. Such an approach allows for a transparent (or direct) interface between syntax and morphology, because it hypothesizes that the same generative system derives all complex objects.2 In the default case, then, the principles that govern the composition of ‘words’ are the same as those that govern the composition of larger syntactic objects.