Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,5, University of Göttingen (Seminar für Englische Philologie), course: Morphology: its relation to syntax, language: English, abstract: There is much discussion in morphological theory as to where exactly morphology belongs in the mental representation of grammar. Several grammar models have been developed, each aiming at describing the key concepts of our grammar and the position of morphology in particular. Traditionally, there seems to have been a general consensus that there exists pre-syntactic (lexical) and post-syntactic components, but recently this has become an issue of debate. A key issue in this discussion is the process of word formation. While some linguists argue that word formation takes place in a separate morphological component, some say syntactic rules also play a part and some argue that words actually are formed in the syntax. Numerous linguists have contributed to this discussion, many proposing new models of morphology and word formation. In this paper, two alternate theories that attempt at describing the position of morphology in the grammar will be outlined. Chapter 2 describes Halle and Marantz’ (1993) model of Distributed Morphology, which presupposes that all word formation takes place in a syntactic module and that there is no such thing as a lexical process. Chapters 3 and 4 give an outline of an alternate view to Distributed Morphology. Chapter 3 describes Booij’s (1993) approach at proving that there are two different types of inflection, and that contrary to former theories, inflection can feed word formation. In chapter 4, Haspelmath (1995) provides much the same view as Booij by showing that inflection also can contribute to changing a word’s part of speech category.

Geert Booij's popular textbook has been revised and updated. It covers every aspect of morphological theory and the analysis of words, examines the relation between morphology and other modules of grammar, and is the only introductory text to explore the role of morphology in language processing and change.

Introduces students to the scientific study of language, using the basic principles of complexity theory.

A self-contained and lively text prepared in response to a perceived need for an up-to-date introduction to the field of morphology within the framework of generative grammar. The material is presented in the framework of the lexicalist hypothesis of Chomsky (1970), but also taking in the more recent development of lexicalist phonology and morphology in the works of Paul Kiparsky and others. Other approaches are recognized, but the use of one unified, consistent theory pushed to its limit makes for a better student text. Each chapter includes a list of terms, of further reading, and a number of exercises. The volume is completed by an index.

The book focuses on the types of word, word building, derivatives, appendices, precedents and suffixes in English

Interest in morphology has undergone rapid growth over the past two decades and the area is now seen as crucially important, both in relation to other aspects of grammar and in relation to other disciplines.

Morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies the internal structure of words, word-formation mechanisms that give rise to new words, and mechanisms that produce wordforms of existing words. Intended as a companion for students of English language and linguistics at both B.A. and M.A. levels, this textbook provides a comprehensive overview of the entire field of English morphology, including English word-formation and English inflectional morphology. The textbook discusses not only basic introductory issues requiring no prior background in linguistics but also fairly controversial theoretical issues which different linguists treat in a different way. As in the previous volumes of the TELL Series, most of the analyses are illustrated with authentic language data, i.e. examples drawn from language corpora like the Corpus of Contemporary American English and British National Corpus.