Morphology as an adaptive discriminative system

The past decade has witnessed a productive convergence of a number of historically separate research strands. One strand explores the implicational models that grew out of classical WP approaches to inflection (e.g., Wurzel 1984; Maiden 2005; Blevins 2006; Ackerman et al. 2009). A second strand extends the information-theoretic perspectives on ‘morphological information’ developed originally in the processing models of Kostić et al. (2003), Moscoso del Prado Martín et al. (2004), and Milin et al. (2009a, b). A third strand investigates a ‘complex systems’ approach to grammatical organization (Ackerman & Blevins 2008; Ackerman et al. 2008; Beckner et al. 2009). The fourth strand develops a cohesive discriminative perspective on language learning and use (Ramscar & Yarlett 2007; Ramscar & Dye 2010; Ramscar et al. 2010, 2013; Ramscar 2013; Arnon & Ramscar 2012; Baayen et al. 2011). This chapter considers how the interaction of these distinct components has produced a general conception of the structure and function of morphological systems which opens significant points of contact with research in other domains.