Cover not available
Part of
Morphological Metatheory
Edited by Daniel Siddiqi and Heidi Harley
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 229] 2016
► pp. 59–94

A postsyntactic morphome cookbook

| University of Leipzig

In this tutorial, I introduce methods to implement morphomes (i.e., systematisc patterns of unnatural syncretism, Aronoff 1994) in Distributed Morphology (DM, Halle & Marantz 1993). Whereas proponents of DM have virtually completely ignored the morphome concept, I show that the theory provides a crucial formal mechanism to transfer morphomes into a postsyntactic setting: “parasitic” morphological features which are not interpretable by syntax, but depend in their distribution on other features. I discuss two canonical methods in DM to make such features available to morphological spellout, postsyntactic rules, and decomposition of syntactic features, and show that parasitic features allow for a formalization of the classical morphome cases and for capturing restrictions imposed by morphomic categories on specific morphological systems.

Published online: 29 June 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.229.03tro
References
Albright, Adam & Fuß, Eric
2012 Syncretism. In The Morphology and Phonology of Exponence, Jochen Trommer (ed.), 236–288. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Stephen R
1992 A-Morphous Morphology. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Aronoff, Mark
1994 Morphology by Itself: Stems and Inflectional Classes. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Arregi, Karlos & Nevins, Andrew
2012 Morphotactics: Basque Auxiliaries and the Structure of Spellout. Dordrecht: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Arsenault, Paul
2007 Marking the unmarked: Exceptional patterns of syncretism in English and Hindi. In Proceedings of the 2007 Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association, Milica Radišić (ed.). [URL]Google Scholar
Baerman, Matthew, Brown, Dunstan & Corbett, Greville
2005 The Syntax-Morphology Interface: A Study of Syncretism. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bauer, Laurie
2003 Introducing Linguistic Morphology. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
2004 A Glossary of Morphology. Edinburgh: EUP.Google Scholar
Béjar, Susana & Hall, Daniel Currie
1999 Marking markedness: The underlying order of diagonal syncretisms. Paper delivered at the Eastern States Conference on Linguistics.
Berko, Jean
1958 The child’s learning of English morphology. Word 14: 150–177. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bierwisch, Manfred
1967 Syntactic features in morphology: General problems of so called pronominal inflection in German. In To Honor Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, 11 October 1966 [Janua Linguarum. Series Maior 31–33], 239–270. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Bloomfield, Leonard
1962 The Menomini Language. New Haven CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Bobaljik, Jonathan D
2012 Universals in Comparative Morphology: Suppletion, Superlatives, and the Structure of Words. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
2008 Paradigms, optimal and otherwise: A case for skepticism. In Inflectional Identity, Asaf Bachrach & Andrew Ira Nevins (eds), 29–44. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Bobaljik, Jonathan D., Nevins, Andrew & Sauerland, Uli
2011 Preface: on the morphosemantics of agreement features. In Markedness and Underspecification in the Morphology and Semantics of Agreement, Jonathan D. Bobaljik, Andrew Nevins & Uli Sauerland (eds). Special issue of Morphology 21(2): 131–140. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bobaljik, Jonathan D
2002 Syncretism without paradigms: Remarks on Williams 1981, 1994. Yearbook of Morphology 2001: 53–85. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bonet, Eulàlia & Harbour, Daniel
2012 Contextual allomorphy. In The Morphology and Phonology of Exponence – The State-of-the-Art, Jochen Trommer (ed.), 195–235. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, Dunstan
& Hippisley, Andrew 2012 Network Morphology A Defaults-based Theory of Word Structure. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Caha, Pavel
2013 Explaining the structure of case paradigms by the mechanisms of Nanosyntax. The Classical Armenian nominal declension. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 3: 1015–1066. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, Noam & Halle, Morris
1968 The Sound Pattern of English. New York NY: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Cysouw, Michael
2003 The Paradigmatic Structure of Person Marking. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Embick, David
1998 Voice systems and the syntax/morphology interface. In Papers from the UPenn/MIT Roundtable on Argument Structure and Aspect [MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 34], Heidi Harley (ed.), 41–72. Cambridge MA: MITWPL.Google Scholar
2000 Features, syntax, and categories in the Latin perfect. Linguistic Inquiry 31(4): 185–230. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010 Localism versus Globalism in Morphology and Phonology. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013 Morphemes and morphophonological loci. In Distributed Morphology Today: Morphemes for Morris Halle, Alec Marantz & Ora Matushansky (eds), 151–166. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2015 On the distribution of stem alternants: Separation and its limits. In The Morphome Debate: Diagnosing and Analyzing Morphomic Patterns, Ricardo Bermudez Otero & Ana Luis (eds). Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Embick, David & Halle, Morris
2005 On the status of stems in morphological theory. In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2003 [Current Issue in Linguistic Theory 270], Twan Geerts, Ivo van Ginneken & Haike Jacobs (eds), 37–62. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Frampton, John
2002 Syncretism, impoverishment, and the structure of person features. In Papers from the 2002, Chicago Linguistic Society Meeting [CLS 38], Mary Andronis, Erin Debenport, Anne Pycha & Keiko Yoshimura (eds), 207–222. Chicago IL: CLS.Google Scholar
Halle, Morris & Marantz, Alec
1993 Distributed Morphology and the pieces of inflection. In The View from Building 20. Essays in Linguistics in Honor of Sylvain Bromberger, Kenneth Hale & S. Jay Keyser (eds), 111–176. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
1994 Some key features of Distributed Morphology. In Papers on Phonology and Morphology [MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 21], Andrew Carnie & Heidi Harley (eds), 275–288. Cambridge MA: MITWPL.Google Scholar
Halle, Morris & Vaux, Bert
1998 Theoretical aspects of Indo-European nominal morphology: The nominal declensions of Latin and Armenian. In Mir Curad: Studies in Honor of Clavert Watkins, Jay Jasanoff, H. Craig Melchert & Lisi Olivier (eds), 223–240. Innsbruck: Innsbrucker Beitraege zur Sprachwissenschaft.Google Scholar
Harbour, Daniel
2006 Person hierarchies and geometries without hierarchies or geometries. Handout of a talk at the University of Toronto Colloquium, October 20.
2011 Valence and atomic number. Linguistic Inquiry 42(4): 561–594. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Harley, Heidi
2008 When is a syncretism more than a syncretism? Impoverishment, metasyncretism and underspecification. In Phi-theory: Phi-Features across Modules and Interfaces, Daniel Harbour, David Adger & Susana Béjar (eds), 251–294. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Harley, Heidi & Noyer, Rolf
1998 Licensing in the non-lexicalist lexicon: Nominalizations, vocabulary items and the encyclopedia. In Papers from the Roundtable on Argument Structure and Aspect [MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 32], Heidi Harley (ed.), 119–137. Cambridge MA: MITWPL.Google Scholar
1999 State-of-the-Article: Distributed Morphology. GLOT 4(4): 3–9.Google Scholar
Harley, Heidi & Ritter, Elizabeth
2002 A feature-geometric analysis of person and number. Language 78(3): 482–526. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kramer, Ruth
2014 Gender in Amharic: A morphosyntactic approach to natural and grammatical gender. Language Sciences 43: 102–115. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Maiden, Martin
2005 Morphological autonomy and diachrony. In Yearbook of Morphology 2004, Geert Booij & Jaap van Marle (eds), 137–175. Dordrecht: Kluwer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marantz, Alec
1991 Case and licensing. In Proceedings of ESCOL ‘91, German Westphal, Benjamin Ao & Hee- Rahk Chae (eds), 234–253. Ithaca NY: Cornell Linguistics Club.Google Scholar
Matthews, Peter H
1974 Morphology. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Moskal, Beata
2014 The curious case of Archi’s ‘father’. In The Proceedings of BLS 39 . Berkeley CA: BLS.
Müller, Gereon
2008 A review of “The Syntax-Morphology Interface. A Study of Syncretism” by Matthew Baerman, Dunstan Brown & Greville G. Corbett. Word Structure 1(2): 199–232. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Neeleman, Ad & Szendröi, Kriszta
2007 Radical pro drop and the morphology of pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry 38(4): 671–714. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nevins, Andrew
2007 The representation of third person and its consequences for person-case effects. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 25(2): 273–313. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2011a Marked triggers vs. marked targets and impoverishment of the dual. Linguistic Inquiry 42: 413–444. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2011b Multiple agree with clitics: Person complementarity vs. omnivorous number. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 29(4): 939–971. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nevins, Andrew & Rodrigues, Cilene
2013 Naturalness biases, morphomes, and the romance first person singular. In The Morphome Debate: Diagnosing and Analysing Morphomic Patterns (forthcoming), Ricardo Bermudez Otero & Ana Luis (eds), Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Noyer, Rolf
1992 Features, Positions and Affixes in Autonomous Morphological Structure. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.
1998 Impoverishment Theory and morphosyntactic markedness. In Morphology and its Relation to Phonology and Syntax, Diane K. Brentari, Steven G. Lapointe & Patrick M. Farrell (eds), 264–286. Stanford CA: CSLI.Google Scholar
Partee, Barbara Hall, ter Meulen, Alice & Wall, Robert E
1990 Mathematical Methods in Linguistics. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar
Pereira, Fernando C.N. & Shieber, Stuart M
2002 Prolog and Natural Language Analysis. Brookline MA: Microtome Publishing.Google Scholar
Pertsova, Katya
2011 Grounding systematic syncretism in learning. Linguistic Inquiry 42(2): 225–266. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pesetsky, David & Torrego, Esther
2007 The syntax of valuation and the interpretability of features. In Phrasal and Clausal Architecture [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 101], Vida Samiian Simin Karimi & Wendy K. Wilkins (eds), 262–294. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Radkevich, Nina V
2010 On Location: The Structure of Case and Adpositions. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Connecticut.
Spencer, Andrew & Sadler, Louisa
2001 Syntax as an exponent of morphological features. In Yearbook of Morphology 2000, Gert Booij & Jaap van Marle (eds), 71–96. Dordrecht: Kluwer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Starke, Michal
2005 Nanosyntax. Seminar taught at CASTL, University of Tromsø.
2009 Nanosyntax. A short primer to a new approach to language. In Nordlyd 36: Special Issue on Nanosyntax, Peter Svenonius, Gillian Ramchand, Michal Starke & Tarald Taraldsen (eds), 1–6. Tromsø: University of Tromsø.Google Scholar
Steriade, Donca
2010 Constraint interactions derive morphomic identity. Talk at the Workshop ‘Perspectives on the Morphome’, Coimbra, October 29–30.
Stonham, John
1994 Combinatorial Morphology [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 120]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stump, Gregory T
2001 Inflectional Morphology. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Svenonius, Peter
2007 Interpreting uninterpretable features. Linguistic Analysis 33: 375–413.Google Scholar
Taraldsen, Tarald
2010 The Nanosyntax of Nguni noun class prefixes and concords. Lingua 120(6): 1522–1548. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tosco, Mauro
2001 The Dhaasanac Language. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe.Google Scholar
Trommer, Jochen
1999 Morphology consuming syntax’ resources: Generation and parsing in a minimalist version of Distributed Morphology. In Proceedings of the ESSLI Workshop on Resource Logics and Minimalist Grammars , Christian Retoré & Edward Stabler (eds), 115–125. Utrecht.
2002 The post-syntactic morphology of the Albanian preposed article: Evidence for Distributed Morphology. Balkanistica 15: 349–364.Google Scholar
2003a Distributed Optimality. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Potsdam.
2003b Feature (non-)insertion in a minimalist approach to spellout. Proceedings of CLS 39: 469–480.Google Scholar
2003c Hungarian has no portmanteau agreement. In Approaches to Hungarian 9, Peter Siptár & Christopher Pinón (eds), 283–302. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.Google Scholar
2005 Die formale Repräsentation von Markierheit in der Flexion des Deutschen. Talk given at the Köln Linguistic Circle, December. [URL]
2006 Direction marking and case in Menominee. In Case, Valence and Transitivity [Studies in Language Companion Series 77], Leonid Kulikov, Andrej Malchukov & Peter de Swart (eds), 91–114. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008a A feature-geometric approach to Amharic verb classes. In Inflectional Identity, Asaf Bachrach & Andrew Nevins (eds), 206–236. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
2008b Third-person marking in Menominee. In Phi-theory: Phi-Features across Modules and Interfaces, Daniel Harbour, Susanna Béjar & David Adger (eds), 221–250. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Walther, Géraldine
2011 Measuring morphological canonicity. In Internal and External Boundaries of Morphology, Gregor Perko (ed.), Linguistica 51: 157–179.Google Scholar
Wunderlich, Dieter
2003 A minimalist view on inflectional paradigms: The expression of person and number in subjects and objects. Ms, Universität Düsseldorf. [URL]
2011 Polarity and constraints on paradigmatic distinctness. In The Morphology and Phonology of Exponence, Jochen Trommer (ed.), Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 11 other publications

Bloch-Trojnar, Maria
2022. The structural underpinnings of multifunctionality and syncretism in non-finite forms in Irish. Folia Linguistica 56:3 ► pp. 585 ff. DOI logo
Bloch-Trojnar, Maria
2022. The structural underpinnings of multifunctionality and syncretism in non-finite forms in Irish. Folia Linguistica 0:0 DOI logo
Christopoulos, Christos & Stanislao Zompì
2023. Taking the nominative (back) out of the accusative. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 41:3 ► pp. 879 ff. DOI logo
Dolatian, Hossep & Peter Guekguezian
2022. Derivational timing of morphomes: canonicity and rule ordering in the Armenian aorist stem. Morphology 32:3 ► pp. 317 ff. DOI logo
Hein, Johannes & Philipp Weisser
2023. Syncretism. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Morphology, ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Herce, Borja
2023. The Typological Diversity of Morphomes, DOI logo
Herce, Borja & Marc Allassonnière-Tang
2024. The meaning of morphomes: distributional semantics of Spanish stem alternations. Linguistics Vanguard 0:0 DOI logo
Kramer, Ruth
2016. Syncretism in paradigm function morphology and distributed morphology. In Morphological Metatheory [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 229], ► pp. 95 ff. DOI logo
QIN, YANG
2024.  Borja Herce, The typological diversity of morphomes: A cross-linguistic study of unnatural morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. Pp. x + 303.. Journal of Linguistics 60:2 ► pp. 469 ff. DOI logo
Spencer, Andrew
2019. Manufacturing consent over Distributed Morphology. Word Structure 12:2 ► pp. 208 ff. DOI logo
Steriade, Donca
2023. Priscianic Word Formation. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Morphology, ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.