The Form and Content of Derivational Relations

Morpheme based theories of word structure encourage us to think of derived words (e.g. \innatable") as built by adding one complex of phonological, syntactic and semantic content (/{bl j /, Adjective, `able to be verbed') to another (/innejt/, Verb | +NP]], `inflate'). This model lacks generality in a number of ways, however. (a) Derivational relationships may not involve the simple addition of material. This result is familiar with respect to the expression of morphological categories, under the name of`non-concatenative' morphology. It is not hard to show that not only the formal reeection of derivational morphology, but also its morphosyntactic and semantic content, may involve truncations, rearrangements and replacements that yield non-monotonic eeects. (b) Phonological, syntactic and semantic relations are not always bundled together in units as implied by the morpheme-based view. Languages often show unitary relations of form, grammar and/or meaning, each of which is found in association with a variety of relations in the other domains. (c) Derivational relations do not always have the di-rectionality one would expect on the basis of the assumption that they are established by adding a new minimal sign to an existing base. (d) The relations characteristic of derivational morphology are not limited to the composition of complex lexical items. A category of (special) clitic elements signal relations between phrases that are closely parallel to the relations between words that are marked by derivational morphology. This paper illustrates the situations noted above from a variety of languages, and argues (following lines originating in the work of Boas, Beard and Jackendoo, among others) that a much more general conception of derivational relations is required than that which we have inherited from structuralist morphology.