Paradigm Function Morphology and the Morphology–Syntax Interface

Syntactic representations of a language’s phrases and sentences accommodate the insertion of morpholexical (= morphological or lexical) expressions drawn or projected from its lexicon. Morphologists disagree about the sorts of morpholexical expressions that are inserted and about the sorts of nodes into which insertion takes place. Some argue that stems and affixes are inserted into separate nodes, hence that the syntactic representation of a single word may involve several instances of morpholexical insertion; in such an approach, words have the status of syntactic complexes, so that a word’s interaction with rules of syntax is mediated by the constellation of nodes (“morphemes”) of which it is constituted. Others argue that words are instead syntactic atoms—that they are inserted into syntactic structure as wholes and that their own internal morphological structure is unavailable to syntactic manipulation; in this approach, a word’s interaction with rules of syntax is entirely determined by the unordered set of morphosyntactic properties associated with the node that it occupies. Scrutiny of the empirical evidence reveals that the latter, WORD-BASED conception of the morphology/syntax interface is more compatible with the range of behaviors exhibited by natural-language morphology than the former, MORPHEME-BASED conception of this interface.