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Chapter 8: Syntax and Morphology

Chapter 8: Syntax and Morphology

pp. 194-219

Authors

, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, , Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
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Summary

CHAPTER OUTLINE

In this chapter, we will look at the interaction between syntax and morphology. You may wonder why this is of interest, because this is not immediately obvious. Syntax gives us a syntactic tree with words dangling from it. These have to be expressed in a particular order, but that is the job for phonology (to be explored in chapter 9), not morphology. So is there anything intriguing about the relationship between the tree and the dangling words that requires our attention? Morphology would be of little interest to a syntactician if the rules of morphology (the science of word structure) operated fully independently from the rules of syntax (the science of sentence structure). One could say that morphology produces words, syntax subsequently uses these words, and that is all there is to it. Reality, however, turns out to be much more complex. Instead of saying that morphology provides the elements that syntax uses, some observations force us to say the exact opposite: syntax provides the input that morphology uses to create words. This in turn suggests that morphology is not a mere delivery service for syntax but that it becomes active after the syntactic representation has been built. Since the relationship between syntax and morphology is more complex than initially envisaged, it makes sense to study the processes that take place at the interface between these two components of grammar. This is exactly what this chapter will do.

Insight: Morphology and Syntax are Different Grammatical Modules

The relationship between syntax and morphology is not always transparent; this justifies its study. This may sound like a completely new concept, but in fact you have already seen concrete cases of mismatches between syntax and morphology. Let us look at three of these.

The first involves the syntactic location of the tense and agreement properties that are part and parcel of finite clauses. Remember that we had reasons to think that these properties reside in a syntactic position that we called Fin, the head of the FinP.

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