A Survey of Current Agendas

Having surveyed the history of word studies from the Greeks to modern times, the next step is to examine current research programs in morphology to determine our bearings. To redress the current imbalance in allomorphic and semantic studies of morphology, we need first to understand that imbalance as it presently stands. This section, therefore, will review current research programs in morphology with a view toward assessing their contribution to the core concern of morphology: the relation of linguistic sound and meaning.

Recent work in morphology has, by and large, continued the Structuralist emphasis on allomorphy, though some studies have returned to the issue of grammatical categories. Carstairs-McCarthy refers to the Structuralist approach as the “bottom-up” approach, because it focuses on phonological issues at the expense of semantic ones. The “top-down” approach focuses on the semantic side of morphology or, more correctly, on the combinations of grammatical categories which grammatical morphemes, inflectional and derivational, mark. Those who approach morphology from either direction seldom deal with the whole morpheme, sound and meaning. “Bottom-up” and “top-down” frameworks usually focus on the phonological or categorial side of the morpheme, respectively, without reference to the other, the most common assumption being that the two are simply directly associated with each other.

Research in morphology associated with the GB school of grammatical studies all share in the common basic assumptions of the LMH mentioned in the discussion of Bloomfield above. Lieber claims, for example, that “affixes differ from non-affix morphemes only in that affixes have as part of their lexical entries, frames indicating the category of items to which they attach as well as the category to which they belong”. She emphasizes also that “especially important for the theory to be developed below is the fact that lexical entries for affixes are identical to lexical entries for non-affix morphemes, except for the presence of sub-categorization information in the entries of the former”.

The appeal of this hypothesis lies in its simplicity: it provides only one basic grammatical element, the morpheme, which is more or less isomorphic with referential terms and predicates. This element is stored in a single component, the lexicon, and is copied into words and phrases by the same simple selection rule that interprets the symbol of a minimal projection and copies an appropriate lexical item onto it from the lexicon. The assumption that affixes belong to the same categories as stems (N, V, A) and are inserted like stems, allows lexical derivation to be conflated with compounding. That is, the copying of a prefix into a derivation is the same process as adding an attribute to a noun to form a compound: do ® undo, boat ® houseboat.

The simplicity of this approach, in fact, is such that Pesetsky, Sproat, and Di Sciullo and Williams have concluded that the lexicon does not contain a rule component. Rather, the lexicon is boring: “The lexicon is like a prison — it contains only the lawless, and the only thing that its inmates have in common is lawlessness”. The principles of derivation and inflection, the inheritance of category features, subcategorization frames, and the like, are those of syntax. The lack of research into the nature of grammatical categories in the published accounts of GB morphology is thus justified by the assumption that grammatical categories differ in no way from those of syntax.