Part 3: Morphological principles

 
Chapter 10: Lexicalism or the Principle of Morphology-free Syntax
Chapter 11: The Principle of Syntax-free Morphology
Chapter 12: Defaults and overrides in morphological description
Chapter 13: Implicative Relations in Morphology
 
The issues raised in Part 2 inform three principles that are the themes of the chapters in Part 3. The first deals with the notion of lexicalism, also known as the Principle of Morphology-free Syntax: no rule of syntax can make reference to the internal structure of a word or to purely morphological features. This principle follows from a particular set of assumptions about morphology’s place in the overall grammar, entailing a clear separation between syntactic and morphological contributions to linguistic expression. A complementary principle is the focus of the next chapter: the Principle of Syntax-free Morphology speaks to the nature of morphological rules, constraining them from referencing syntactic context and therefore entailing a purely featural interface between syntax and morphology. This chapter addresses puzzling phenomena that straddle the syntactic and morphological worlds such as clisis, periphrasis, and ‘shape conditions’ (Zwicky 1985). The third chapter looks at complex interactions among rules and lexical entries and examines the hypothesis that these interactions embody default-override relations whose effects are regulated by universal principles. In contrast to an exponent-based approach to morphology, the implicative approach employs realization rules to deduce the realization of a cell from that of some contrasting cell. The realization of certain cells may be highly predictable, while that of other cells may be difficult or impossible to predict. All four chapters include discussion of evidence that is claimed to favor the relevant principles as well as apparent counterevidence.
 
 
Jump to:
Part 1: Foundations of morphological theory
Part 2: Issues in morphological theory
Part 4: Morphological frameworks
Part 5: The role of morphology in theories of phonology and syntax
Part 6: Domains for the evaluation of morphological theories
Appendix: Sources and resources for morphological research