Setting Our Bearings

Morphology is superficially the sum of all the phonological means for expressing the relations of the constituents of words, of words in phrases, and of the phrasal constituents of sentences. The key element of morphology is the word, a symbol comprising mutually implied sound and meaning. The central purpose of morphology, therefore, is to map sound to meaning within the word and between words. The issues of morphology are what constitutes linguistic sound, what determines linguistic meaning, and how the two are related. Since these questions are central to the linguistic enterprise in general, morphology should be the centerpiece of language study. Yet, instead of gravitating to the center of linguistics during the recent Generativist revolution in language studies, in the past few decades morphology has all but vanished from the agenda of linguistic inquiry.

One reason for this malaise of the discipline is the unresolved flaws in the European Structuralist model of morphology inherited by Generativist theory — zero morphology, empty morphology, morphological asymmetry. Perhaps for this reason, the Generativist tradition has yet to find a firm place for morphology in its theoretical models. Indeed, some Generativists argue that morphology does not even exist outside the general principles of syntax and phonology, and the storage capacities of the lexicon. The reason for the underestimation of morphology’s contribution to the sentence is the Generativists’ simple view of the morpheme. From Plato to Baudouin, the word was taken to be the smallest linguistic sign. Since Baudouin, however, “the minimal meaningful unit of language”, has been the morpheme, the sublexical constituent of words. While the status of the word as a linguistic sign is uncontroversial, the term ‘word’ itself has defied all attempts at definition; indeed, this recalcitrance prompted the original interest in the proposition that morphemes are the primitive linguistic signs. The result is a genuine quandary: morphemes fail to behave consistently like signs and words defy definition.

The second reason for the malaise in the discipline is that while the word and morpheme have two sides: the semantic and phonological, only for a brief period in the 19^th century did research treat both sides evenly in any attempt to account for the relation between the two. The initial interest of the Greeks centered exclusively on the semantic side of words, their various categories and subcategories. Over the centuries interest slowly shifted, not to a balanced scrutiny of the meaning and sound of morphemes, nor to the crucial relation between the two, but rather to the exclusive study of the phonological side of morphemes that dominated the Structuralist school.

The next section, a brief overview of this historical shift, outlines this imbalance and provides a frame of reference for the present work. The central issues and assumptions of morphology, which this book will ad­dress in subsequent chapters, will be drawn from this historical survey.