Revisiting Morphological Composition

The model of constructive morphology has been widely adopted in recent morphosyntactic research in LFG, especially in the areas of case marking (Nordlinger (1998a, b), Lee (1999,2002), Sharma (1999)) and the encoding of tense, aspect and mood information on non-head constituents (Barron 1998, Sadler 1998, Nordlinger and Sadler 2000). One of the central tenets of this approach is the Principle of Morphological Composition (PMC) (Nordlinger 1998a) which constrains the interaction of f-structure information contributed by the morphology, such that the structure built by any given affix is outside that built by the stem to which it is attached. The PMC as presently formulated, however, makes crucial reference to a morphemic, word-syntax approach to morphology and thus suffers from the many shortcomings of morpheme-based approaches (e.g. Stump 2001). In this paper we show how the insights of the PMC can be combined with the inferential-realisational approach of Paradigm Function Morphology (Stump 2001). This not only brings constructive morphology into step with much other recent work in LFG morphology, which has favoured the realisational view (e.g. Börjars, Vincent and Chapman 1997, Sadler and Spencer 2001, Sells 2001, Ackerman and Stump (forthcoming) and others), but also provides a more natural account for many empirical facts not adequately addressed by the morpheme-based model.

References

• J. Barron (1998) 'have' Contraction: explaining 'trace effects' in a theory without movement, Linguistics, 36/2.
• K. Börjars, N. Vincent and C. Chapman (1997) Paradigms, Periphrasis and Pronominal Inflection. YOM 1996.
• H. Lee (1999) The Domain of Grammatical Case in Lexical Functional Grammar, Proceedings of LFG99.
• H. Lee (2002) A lexicalist OT approach to case, Manuscript.
• R. Nordlinger (1998a) Constructive Case: Evidence from Australian Languages, CSLI, Stanford.
• R. Nordlinger (1998b) Complementizing Case in Australian Languages Proceedings of LFG98
• L. Sadler (1998) English Auxiliaries as Tense Inflections Essex Research Reports in Linguistics.
• R. Nordlinger and L. Sadler (2000) Tense as a Nominal Category Proceedings of LFG00.
• L. Sadler and A. Spencer (2000) Syntax as an Exponent of Morphological Features, YOM 1999.
• P. Sells (2001) Syntactic Information and its Morphological Expression, Manuscript.
• D. Sharma (1999) Nominal Clitics and Constructive Morphology in Hindi, Proceedings of LFG99.
• G. Stump (2001) Inflectional Morphology: A Theory of Paradigm Structure, CUP.

Not submitted; contact authors for original LFG02 slides or current manuscript.