Core Principles of Morphological Exponence

It is one of the hallmarks of natural language that abstract morphosyntactic and semantic information is realized in an intricate way by phonological structure. This mapping of representations of radically different types closely related to Martinet’s (1960) notion of ‘double articulation’ is traditionally called ‘exponence’ (Matthews, 1991). This network brings together researchers from theoretical morphology and phonology to evaluate the properties of what we see as an emerging standard model of morphological exponence, and to explore on the basis of extensive crosslinguistic evidence how its core mechanisms can be simplified, minimized and restricted to the range of empirically observable data. To this end, we focus on syntagmatic and paradigmatic aspects of four basic areas of exponence: identity of exponence, nonidentity of exponence, parasitic exponence and zero exponence. The central questions we want to investigate are, what theoretically significant types of exponence there are and how core mechanisms of exponence relate morphological and phonological aspects of these domains.