Current Morphology

Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134984169
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book aims to provide a thorough and wide-ranging introduction to approaches to morphology in linguistic theory over the last twenty years. This comprehensive survey concentrates not only on the generative linguistic mainstream, but on approaches that are less fashionable or relatively unknown to English-speaking linguists, and highlights recent European, particularly German-speaking research.

Part I
Introduction

1 Aims and scope

1.1 MORPHOLOGY WITHIN LINGUISTIC THEORY:
CENTRAL OR PERIPHERAL?

The revival of morphology as a subject of study by theoretical linguists has been announced more than once in recent years. In fact, it has become something of a cliché for collections of papers on morphology to begin with an editorial statement hailing the bright new dawn (Hammond and Noonan 1988; Booij and van Marle 1988). But this new atmosphere has not affected the status of morphology as an ‘optional extra’ in most linguistics degree programmes. As the published output in linguistics has expanded and new specialisms have proliferated, pressure on the time available in the average linguistics programme has grown correspondingly. Morphology has to compete for space in the syllabus with topics such as pragmatics, cognitive science, language acquisition and sign language, which scarcely existed as ‘teachable’ specialisms twenty years ago. So, even in linguistics programmes with a ‘theoretical’ orientation, phonology and syntax maintain their sway as the two indispensable core requirements, and morphology has not generally managed to establish itself alongside them.

It is true that all linguists know something about morphology. In most introductory courses, ‘morpheme’ follows close on the heels of ‘phoneme’ in the first batch of technical terms to which beginners are exposed. In most such courses, too, students are invited to inspect an array of verb forms from a language such as Swahili or Turkish, insert morpheme boundaries, and identify the lexical or grammatical ‘meanings’ of the morphemes thus isolated. There will also be some discussion of the contrast between the ‘regular’ forms of English noun plurals such as cats, dogs and horses and the ‘irregular’ forms of sheep, oxen and mice, though the instructor’s definition of ‘morpheme’ may leave it frustratingly unclear whether sheep and mice consist of one morpheme or two. In later courses, where budding theoretical linguists are taught the importance of constraining the power of syntactic rules, they may learn of the reasons which persuaded Chomsky (1970) that at least some word formation should be relegated to the ‘lexicon’ (what Bloomfield (1933:274) called the ‘list of basic irregularities’) rather than handled syntactically. In phonology, they will be invited to pay attention to those morphological alternations which can be accounted for in terms of phonological processes and to ignore those which cannot. This kind of training is likely to create the impression that, because words are more idiosyncratic in their structure and meaning than phrases and clauses are, the constraints which govern morphological behaviour must be fewer and looser than those which govern syntax, and the search for these constraints is bound to be relatively unrewarding to the linguistic theorist or student of Universal Grammar.

This book is addressed mainly to linguists who have had only the perfunctory morphological training just outlined but who are willing to be persuaded that the resultant pessimistic impression may be misleading. It is also addressed to linguists who are already expert in one approach to morphology but who are inquisitive about other ‘schools’. The first-order aims are to summarise various approaches which are current or which directly influence current work, to discuss their main strengths and weaknesses, and (in chapter 9) to point to wider aspects of linguistic theory and linguistic methodology on which morphology has a special bearing. But there is a second-order aim: to persuade more linguists to take up morphological issues. Naturally I will be pleased if some readers share my assessments of the approaches discussed; but I will be equally pleased if I encourage new researchers into morphology, whatever conclusions they come to.

1.2 EARLIER ATTITUDES TO MORPHOLOGY

In pregenerative twentieth-century linguistics, both European and American, much attention was paid to morphological issues.¹ In America, the emphasis was on the criteria for identifying morphemes and the conditions for recognising ‘discontinuous’, ‘zero’, ‘replacive’ and ‘portmanteau morphs’, while some European linguists debated how (if at all) the relationship between grammatical properties was reflected in the relationship between their morphological expressions. In nineteenth-century linguistics, with its mainly historical orientation, inflectional paradigms and the operation of ‘analogy’ shared centre stage with the debate on the exceptionlessness of ‘sound laws’. So the Saussurean revolution, unlike the Chomskyan one, did not affect the central position of morphology in linguistic theory. The dramatic shift in theoretical linguistic priorities after Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures appeared in 1957 is well known and has been amply chronicled by Newmeyer (1980). Initially, some shift was inevitable, given that the new theoretical framework provided ways of tackling exciting new questions in the previously neglected domain of sentence structure. But the growing emphasis on aspects of grammar which are innate rather than learned seemed to supply a more substantial reason for continuing to sideline morphology, because the ratio of what is learned to what is innate appeared higher in morphology than in syntax. (We will return to this issue in chapter 9.) Even so, several linguists kept the morphological flame alive in the years between 1957 and the mid- 1970s, including several who would call themselves ‘generative’.

English is notoriously poor in inflectional morphology, and it is tempting, though pointless, to speculate on the course which generative theory might have taken in its first two decades if most of its practitioners had been native speakers of (say) Russian rather than English. Not surprisingly, most pioneers of generative morphology in the 1960s and early 1970s were Europeans, who saw that morphology had to be ‘done’ somehow if accounts of morphologically complex languages were to be descriptively adequate, even if from the point of view of Universal Grammar it should turn out to be a relatively unconstrained and therefore uninteresting domain. Work of this kind was done on, for example, German (Bierwisch 1967; Wurzel 1970), Swedish (Kiefer 1970), modern Greek (Warburton 1973) and Hungarian (Mel’cuk 1973). All these writers were concerned mainly with inflectional morphology, and all located it somewhere ‘between’ lexically interpreted surface structures and the phonological component—roughly where Chomsky and Halle (1968) located ‘readjustment rules’ such as the rule which ensures that the verb sing undergoes vowel change rather than suffixation in the past tense. Among linguists writing in English, Matthews (1972) was virtually unique in pursuing morphological interests which were independent of contemporary generative concerns, expounding the advantages of a ‘word-based’ rather than a ‘morpheme-based’ approach to morphology (what Hockett 1954 and Robins 1959 called the ‘Word-and-Paradigm’ model).

Paradoxically, none of this work contributed much at the time to the rehabilitation of morphology within Chomskyan generative grammar. This had to wait for the implications of Chomsky’s (1970) study of English nominalisation to sink in. But, since then, the relevance of this earlier work to current debates has been increasingly realised. For example, Wurzel’s work on German influenced Lieber’s account of morphological alternation (chapter 2), Bierwisch’s approach to inflectional homonymy has influenced Zwicky’s (chapter 7), and Matthews’s Word-and-Paradigm framework has even inspired a nickname (‘Extended Word-and-Paradigm’) for S.R.Anderson’s framework (chapter 7). In fact, as 1957 and 1970 recede, they seem in retrospect less and less significant as watersheds in morphological research. Is this evidence of a laudable readiness to build on past achievements, or of theoretical stagnation? Unfortunately, that kind of question has no objective answer!

1.3 TOPICS COVERED AND TOPICS EXCLUDED

This book is not a beginner’s introduction to morphology, such as is offered by Matthews (1974), Bergenholtz and Mugdan (1979) and Bauer (1988). Nor is it specifically an introduction to generative work, as offered by Scalise (1984) or Spencer (1991), although such work inevitably looms large in it. Rather, this book attempts to survey the most influential developments in theoretical linguistic approaches to morphology in North America, Europe and Australasia over the last twenty years or so, as well as some developments which deserve to be more influential than they have been so far, in such a way as to help the reader to get to grips with the primary material.

The author of a survey such as this has to decide whether to organise the material around ‘schools’ (with the drawback that one issue may be discussed in several places) or around ‘issues’ (so that discussion of individual scholars is scattered). I have settled for a compromise.Part II (chapters 2 – 4) is ‘school-oriented’ in that it covers the Chomskyan impetus—work developing or reacting against ideas found in Chomsky and Halle’s The Sound Pattern of English (1968) or Chomsky’s ‘Remarks on nominalization’ (1970). Within part II, the chapters are issue-oriented, focusing in turn on morphology’s relationship with the lexicon, phonology and syntax.Part III (chapters 5 – 8) covers work whose impetus is not Chomskyan. This does not mean that all this work is nongenerative (much less ‘anti-generative’), merely that the relevant issues are substantially independent of those raised by Chomsky and Halle.Chapter 8 focuses on the Natural Morphology ‘school’ and some related work, but chapters 5 – 7 are issue-oriented; the result is that discussion of Bybee and of Carstairs² is divided between chapters, but it is easy to identify the sections concerned. In part IV (chapter 9) I offer my own suggestions about where the study of morphology might go from here and about its relevance to wider issues.

On the phonological side, I take morphology to include morphophonology, which figures in chapters 3 and 8 especially. On the syntactic side, I have included incorporation but I have not attempted a full survey of recent work on clitics, limiting myself to aspects of their behaviour which have been linked to specifically morphological issues (chapter 4). As for morphosyntactic properties or features (accusative case, past tense and so on), I concentrate on their morphological aspect (how they are structured and realised) rather than on their syntactic aspect (how they are distributed among syntactic constituents, and how ‘agreement’ and ‘government’ operate). This implies that I think that the two aspects are sufficiently independent in general to allow separate discussion; but they are almost certainly not independent entirely, and on the extent and nature of their mutual influence the reader should consult Corbett (1983; 1987; 1988). The interface between derivational morphology and lexical semantics has not received much attention in recent years, so there is little to report there; but I argue in chapters 2 and 6 that this is a serious deficiency.

The import of the restriction to ‘theoretical linguistic approaches’ is that I do not attempt to cover psycholinguistic and computational studies in morphology, except where they are cited in discussion by some theoretical morphologist. This is certainly not meant to imply that I believe that such studies are irrelevant to ‘linguistic’ morphology. I acknowledge that, in omitting them, I could be accused of perpetuating a habit of neglect and of communication failure. My only excuse is that the book is long enough as it is, and I doubt my own competence to do justice to these areas. I strongly urge readers to make good the deficiency for themselves. Entrées to recent psycholinguistic work on morphology are provided by Aitchison (1987), de Bleser and Bayer (1988) and Stemberger and MacWhinney (1988), as well as in a collection of papers from the Conference on Linguistic and Psychological Approaches to Morphology held at Cambridge in 1987, published as Linguistics 26.4 (1988).

This book does not provide a single coherent network of definitions of terms such as ‘morpheme’, ‘inflection’, ‘morphosyntactic category’ and so on, because all these terms are used more or less differently by different linguists.³ Where appropriate I quote individual linguists’ definitions; but my emphasis is on illustrating the kinds of facts which different morphological approaches seek to account for rather than on comparing and contrasting their terminologies.

Part II
The Chomskyan impetus in morphological research

2 Morphology and the lexicon

2.1 INTRODUCTION

Although generative work on morphology has advanced greatly in scope and sophistication in the last twenty years, the morphological agenda for generative linguists is still conditioned to a remarkable extent by the problems originally addressed by Chomsky in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) and ‘Remarks on nominalization’ (1970) and by Halle in ‘Prolegomena to a theory of word-formation’ (1973). Our approach will be selective and critical; we will concentrate on those aspects of what they said or did not say which seem most relevant to subsequent developments. In section 2.1.5 we will list the questions which Chomsky’s and Halle’s work provoked, and in later sections discuss what answers to them (if any) have been proposed in more recent work.¹

2.1.1 Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax

Bloomfield (1933:274) called the lexicon ‘an appendix of the grammar, a list of basic irregularities’. On this view, the lexicon is irredeemably untidy, so it is bound to be that aspect of any language which is of least interest to the linguistic theorist. In Chomsky’s Aspects (1965), a tidying-up process begins; we find there the first outline of a generative theory of the lexicon, with proposals on how lexical entries are structured and organised.

Each lexical item is to be supplied with syntactic, semantic and phonological information. The syntactic information for each item includes its category (Noun, Verb, etc.) and perhaps subcategory (Proper Noun, Intransitive Verb, etc.), as well as selection restrictions, which relate to syntactic or semantic characteristics of other items in the immediate syntactic context. In addition, lexical entries may be abbreviated by appeal to lexical redundancy rules. Let us apply these notions to the following examples:

John admires sincerity grudgingly.

John admires sincerity.

*John weighs 70 kilos grudgingly.

John weighs 70 kilos.

*John admires.

*John elapses sincerity.

*Sincerity admires John.

The well-formedness of (1) and (2) demonstrates that the verb admire must be subcategorised to allow either a following noun phrase plus manner adverbial, as in (1), or a following noun phrase alone, as in (2). But these two subcategorisations ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• LINGUISTIC THEORY GUIDES
• SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PART I: INTRODUCTION
• PART II: THE CHOMSKYAN IMPETUS IN MORPHOLOGICAL RESEARCH
• PART III: OTHER IMPETUSES IN MORPHOLOGICAL RESEARCH
• PART IV: CONCLUSIONS