Two perennial problems of morphology,  and how a constructional approach solves them
Creators: name: Haspelmath, Martin
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024

description: Two perennial problems of morphology, and how a constructional approach solves them

 

In this talk, I address two perennial problems of morphology: the unclear inflection-derivation distinction, and the ideological contrast between morph-based and paradigm-based approaches. Both have been seen as having large-scale repercussions for grammatical theory, but I will argue that the problems disappear one we adopt a constructional approach in which there is not necessarily any componential (or architectural) difference between grammar and lexicon, but where a grammatical system consists of inventorial items (forms and constructions) of various degrees of generality.

 

The inflection-derivation distinction has sometimes been said to be essential for the notion of “lexeme” and thus for the word-based (or lexeme-based) approach to morphology (e.g. Bonami et al. 2018). In practice, linguists typically make the distinction in the language they use, e.g. by talking about words “inflecting for categories” (for inflection), and about “words being formed or created” (for derivation). But in practice, the distinction has been found hard to draw (e.g. Plank 1994; Booij 2000), and I will suggest that it is mostly based on traditional stereotypes (words as descibed by grammatical paradigms, or words as described in dictionaries). On a constructional view (e.g. Jackendoff & Audring 2020), no distinction needs to be made.

 

Similarly, the distinction between the morph-based approach (associated with American descriptivism) and the paradigm-based or word-based approach (e.g. Anderson 1992; Stump 2001) has often been highlighted by morphologists (cf. Stewart 2016) and has taken on an almost ideological quality. But while many morphologists have rightly emphasized the limitations of the classical morph(eme) concept (e.g. Anderson 2015; Luís 2023), saying that morphology must be “word-based” cannot be a general solution, as there is no good basis for a universal “word” concept (Haspelmath 2011). I will argue that again, the solution comes from the constructional view: Not only non-concatenative and non-isomorphic patterns can be described in this way, but also concatenative patterns, and all syntactic patterns, too. Thus, the constructional approach is fully compatible with a non-componential view of morphosyntax, where there is not only no grammar-lexicon dichotomy, but no dichotomy between morphology and syntax either.

 

It is true that languages have some properties that make it appear that their structures correspond to our traditional divisions (syntax, morphology, lexicon), but the constructional view does not make it necessary to assume these divisions. On the contrary, it becomes possible to investigate empirically whether these properties are more than just appearances, whether they can be explained in other ways (e.g. by appealing to principles of efficient coding), or whether a qualified componential view may be justified after all.

 

References

 

Anderson, Stephen R. 1992. A-morphous morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Anderson, Stephen R. 2015. The morpheme: Its nature and use. In Baerman, Matthew (ed.), The Oxford handbook of inflection, 11–33. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bonami, Olivier & Boyé, Gilles & Dal, Georgette & Giraudo, Hélène & Namer, Fiammetta. 2018. Introduction. In Bonami, Olivier & Boyé, Gilles & Dal, Georgette & Giraudo, Hélène & Namer, Fiammetta (eds.), The lexeme in descriptive and theoretical morphology, v–xiv. Berlin: Language Science Press. (https://zenodo.org/record/1406985)

Booij, Geert E. 2000. Inflection and derivation. In Booij, Geert E. & Lehmann, Christian & Mugdan, Joachim (eds.), Morphology: An international handbook on inflection and word-formation (Volume 1), 360–369. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. (https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110111286.1.5.360)

Haspelmath, Martin. 2011. The indeterminacy of word segmentation and the nature of morphology and syntax. Folia Linguistica 45(1). 31–80. (doi:10.1515/flin-2017-1005)

Jackendoff, Ray & Audring, Jenny. 2020. The texture of the lexicon: Relational Morphology and the Parallel Architecture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Luís, Ana R. 2023. Exploring divergent views on word structure: Challenging the concept of the morpheme. Biblos (9). 277–299. (doi:10.14195/0870-4112_3-9_13)

Plank, Frans. 1994. Inflection and derivation. In Asher, R.E. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 1671–1678. Oxford: Pergamon. (doi:10.5281/zenodo.5817771)

Stewart, Thomas W. 2016. Contemporary morphological theories: A user’s guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Stump, Gregory T. 2001. Inflectional morphology: A theory of paradigm structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.