A-Morphous Morphology

In A-Morphous Morphology, Stephen Anderson presents a theory of word structure which relates to a full generative grammar of language. He holds word structure to be the result of interacting principles from a number of grammatical areas, and thus not localized in a single morphological component. Dispensing with classical morphemes, the theory instead treats morphology as a matter of rule-governed relations, minimizing the non-phonological internal structure assigned to words and eliminating morphologically motivated boundary elements. Professor Anderson makes the further claim that the properties of individual lexical items are not visible to, or manipulated by, the rules of the syntax, and assimilates to morphology special clitic phenomena. A-Morphous Morphology maintains significant distinctions between inflection, derivation, and compounding, in terms of their place ina grammar. It also contains discussion of the implications of this new A-Morphous position analysis of word structure.

• Stephen Anderson is well-known as a scholar in linguistics and the cognitive sciences. His current interests are morphology and also phonology, including American Sign Language phonology • Morphology as a subject area within linguistics is receiving revived attention. Anderson here offers his own new theory which breaks with classical morphology and is more holistic in linguistic structural terms • This is not a survey of the different positions on morphology, but an important new theory, expansively explained, with discussion of its implications for other issues in linguistics

Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. The study of word structure; 2. Why have a morphology at all?; 3. Is morphology really about morphemes?; 4. The interaction of morphology and syntax; 5. The theory of inflection; 6. Some complex inflectional systems; 7. Morphology in the lexicon: derivation; 8. Clitics are phrasal affixes; 9. The relation of morphology to phonology; 10. How much structure do words have?; 11. Composites: words with internal structure; 12. Morphology and the typology of languages; 13. Morphological change; 14. Morphology as a computational problem; References; Index.