Chapter : e role of morphology in Transformational Grammar

A common view of the history of morphological research within the tradition of Generative Grammar, and one that the present author has himself retailed on various occasions, goes as follows. As successors to the American Structuralists, early generative grammarians (especially Noam Chomsky, a student of Zellig Harris) inherited the structuralist theory of the morpheme as a basic component of linguistic expressions. On this picture, morphemes were seen as more or less Saussurean minimal signs: irreducible associations of (phonemic) form with grammatical or semantic content. Chomsky’s own earlier work on the morphology of Hebrew (Chomsky  []) had made it clear to him that in the general case, the relation between morphemes and phonological form was much more complex and abstract than generally assumed in structuralist work, but discrete morphemes were still taken to serve as the link between form and content. Words, and by extension phrases, were to be analyzed as exhaustively composed of these morphemes, organized hierarchically into progressively larger structures. Within Generative Grammar, the two substantive branches of morphological theory were both trivialized. On the one hand, the study of allomorphy, the variation in shape displayed by individual morphemes, was to be largely subsumed under the much broader conception of phonology held by generativists in comparison with their predecessors, leaving little residue beyond the listing of arbitrary, unsystematic and suppletive alternants. On the other hand morphotactics, the study of the combination of morphemes into larger units, was to be seen simply as syntax, with morphemes serving as the terminal nodes of phrase markers. ere is a mild irony here, since a similar reduction in the opposite direction (with syntax taken as simply the morphotactics of increasingly large domains) characterized much structuralist thought. ese two consequences of the emerging approach to language in the s and s left little content for a theory of morphology per se, and the fieldmore or less disappeared as a focus of interest. It was only beginning in the s and s, as evidence accumulated that the internal structure of words is interestingly distinct from that of phrases (see e.g. Zwicky ), and that variation based on morphemic identity follows different principles from that based on purely phonological factors alone (see e.g. Anderson : ff.), that morphology re-appeared as a distinct focus of attention.