3 Distributed Morphology and the Pieces of Inflection Morris Halle and

1 Morphology with or without Affixes The last few years have seen the emergence of several clearly articulated alternative approaches to morphology. One such approach rests on the notion that only stems of the so-called lexical categories (N, V, A) are morpheme "pieces" in the traditional sense—connections between (bundles of) meaning (features) and (bundles of) sound (features). What look like affixes on this view are merely the by-product of morphophonological rules called word formation rules (WFRs) that are sensitive to features associated with the lexical categories, called lexemes. Such an amorphous or affixless theory, adumbrated by Beard (1966) and Aronoff (1976), has been articulated most notably by Anderson (1992) and in major new studies by Aronoff (1992) and Beard (1991). In contrast, Lieber (1992) has refined the traditional notion that affixes as well as lexical stems are "mor-pheme" pieces whose lexical entries relate phonological form with meaning and function. For Lieber and other "lexicalists" (see, e.g., Jensen 1990), the combining of lexical items creates the words that operate in the syntax. In this paper we describe and defend a third theory of morphology , Distributed Morphology, 1 which combines features of the affixless and the lexicalist alternatives. With Anderson, Beard, and Aronoff, we endorse the separation of the terminal elements involved in the syntax from the phonological realization of these elements. With Lieber and the lexicalists, on the other hand, we take the phonological realization of the terminal elements in the syntax to be governed by lexical (Vocabulary) entries that relate bundles of morphosyntactic features to bundles of pho-nological features. We have called our approach Distributed Morphology (hereafter DM) to highlight the fact that the machinery of what traditionally has been called morphology is not concentrated in a single component of the gram