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11 - The Autonomy of Morphology

from Part Three - Morphology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2022

By
Louise Esher  and
Paul O’Neill
Edited by
Adam Ledgeway  and
Martin Maiden
Adam Ledgeway
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Martin Maiden
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

In this contribution we acknowledge that morphology interacts with, and is intimately related to, semantics, syntax, and phonology, but we maintain that it has an existence independent to these systems and is not conceptually irreducible to them. This fact underlies the claim of the autonomy of morphology: that morphology possesses its own laws, principles, and methodology which are not simply deducible from or reducible to those of other disciplines. We provide a brief overview of the origins of the concept of autonomous morphology, the main ways that it has been applied to the Romance languages, and how it is related to the concept of the morphome. We then provide a typological overview of the canonical cases of linguistic structures which support the autonomy of morphology and note the magnitude of evidence from the Romance languages. We conclude with some theoretical observations and reflections as to why purely morphological phenomena have so often been reduced to syntactic or phonological explanations. We suggest that the answer lies in ingrained assumptions about the basic units of mental storage, morphology being conceived as a concatenative constructive process and a theoretical reductionist tendency to relate phenomena to a single coherent system and organizing principle.

Keywords

morphomesautonomymetamorphomesrhizomorphomesstem spaces
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Romance Linguistics , pp. 346 - 370
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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References

Selected References

Anderson, S. (1992). A-morphous Morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aronoff, M. (1994). Morphology by Itself. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Baerman, M., Brown, D., and Corbett, G. (eds) (2015). Understanding and Measuring Morphological Complexity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blevins, J. (2016). Word and Paradigm Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blevins, J. and Blevins, J. (eds) (2009). Analogy in Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carstairs-McCarthy, A. (2010). The Evolution of Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cruschina, S., Maiden, M., and Smith, J. C. (eds) (2013). The Boundaries of Pure Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Luís, A. and Bermúdez-Otero, R. (eds) (2016). The Morphome Debate. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maiden, M. (2018). The Romance Verb. Morphomic Structure and Diachrony. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maiden, M., Smith, J. C., Goldbach, M., and Hinzelin, M.-O. (eds) (2011). Morphological Autonomy. Perspectives from Romance Inflectional Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sims, A. (2016). Inflectional Defectiveness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Stump, G. (2016). Inflectional Paradigms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar

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