Where's Morphology?

In the early years of the development of a theory of generative grammar (roughly 1955 through the early 1970s), a striking difference between the research problems that characterized the emerging field and those that had occupied its predecessors was the precipitous decline of the study of morphology. The principles of word structure can be divided roughly between those that govern the distribution of "morphemes" or subconstituents of a word and those that govern the variations in shape shown by these elements; and early developments in phonology and syntax left little if any distinctive content to such a field in either of these two domains. In phonology, the discovery was made that when we extend the scope of rule governed generalizations beyond the particular limits imposed (as in classical phonemic theory) by surface contrast, the effect is to increase the range of cases in which variation in shape shown by a linguistically elementary unit can be reduced to a single underlying form. This observation raised the very real possibility that (with the exception of the facts of lexically governed suppletion, which are comparatively uninteresting from the point of view of linguistic structure) all of the study of "allomorphy" would turn out to be encompassed within the domain of phonology. In syntax, similarly, it seemed that the inherent basis of the principles governing the distribution of significant elements provided no particular justification for limiting their operands to units of (at least) the size of entire words. Work such as Lees's classic description of English nominalizations and much that followed, culminating perhaps in the program of "Generative Semantics" in the late 1960s and early 1970s, seemed to subsume the principles governing morphemes (and even phonologically unrealized "semantic" units) under exactly the same set of principles as those determining sentence structure. With neither morpheme distributions nor allomorphy to account for, then, morphologists could safely go to the beach. Recent years have seen the reappearance of a field of morphology, since both of