Separating the Central from Peripheral Issues

Argument linking and inheritance, on the one hand, and autosegmental representations and level ordering, on the other, raise issues of constraints on the categorial and formal sides of morphology, respectively, and must be dealt with in the chapters to follow. However, these treatments of categories and allomorphy do not get at the central issue of morphology: the relation between the two. Because morphology bridges the levels of meaning and sound, this issue is paramount to morphological research. How is it that phonological expressions convey meaning when we speak? What are the constraints on the mapping of meaning to sound at the atomic level? This issue is not a trivial one because the widespread occurrence of zero and empty grammatical morphemes brings sign theory itself into question in ways which cannot simply be ignored as they have been in the recent past.

The literature up to now has revealed several types of morphological objects and operations. Lexemes, morphemes, stems, and roots are the fundamental objects of morphology, while the most salient operations are derivation, conversion, transposition, compounding, affixation, revowelling, reduplication, contraction, and metathesis. No complete list of grammatical categories has been compiled and the number seems to be quite large though closed. The list would include such expressive derivational categories as Diminution, Augmentation, Pejorativity, Affection, and functional categories such as Subjective (baker). Objective (employee), Instrumental (mixer), Locational (bakery). A workable theory of morphology in any viable model of grammar must not merely account for all these operations, categories, and objects, but also demonstrate how they interact and interrelate.

The fundamental questions of morphology which emerge from the ancient and current research on the structure of words, then, seem to be the following:

1. What are the grammatical atoms, the basic elements of language:

a. the morpheme (lexical and grammatical)?

b. the lexeme and the grammatical morpheme?

2. How are phonological, grammatical, and semantic representations of the basic grammatical elements related at each of their respective levels:

a. directly (biuniquely)?

b. indirectly (conditionally and, if so, how)?

c. both?

3. How many morphologies are there:

a. inflectional and derivational (Split Morphology)?

b. only one (Integrated Morphology)?

4. What are the categories of morphology?

a. What is the outer limit on their number and what determines it?

b. What is the nature of these categories?

(1) grammatical or semantic?

(2) How are derivational and inflectional categories related?

5. What are morphological rules:

a. special morphological operations (WP morphology)?

b. lexical insertion + allomorphy (Lexical Morphology)?

c. the operations of syntax (Word Syntax)?

6. Finally, what adjustments to syntactic theory are required to accommodate a theory of morphology?

This book will develop a model of lexicology and morphology focused specifically on these issues.