#distributed morphology

[allthingslinguistic]

Syntax takes on the “is your child texting about” meme. (Previously, a phonetics version.)

[manifestosimaginarios]

How would you describe a cat?

distributed morphology diagram: "Little furry thing. likes to sleep on my face."

that's such a beautiful hilarious and weird description, most of all: it's true, my cat does like to pretend it's a hat maybe it's my sleep deprived brain trying to find joy and fun while I cram for my finals

omg the more I stare at it the weirder it gets

anyways here is the source material:

SIDDIQUI, Daniel. Syntax within the word: economy, allomorphy, and argument selection in Distributed Morphology. Amsterdan: John Benjamins, 2009.

[dimitja]

This paper brings the reader the following news: Lexicalism is dead, deceased, demised, no more, passed on… [...] But the people that work on word-sized domains are morphologists, and when morphologists talk, linguists nap. [...] I will scream in agony if I read or hear anyone summarizing this paper as, “Marantz argues grammatical theory would be simpler without a lexicon,” or, “the paper shows that Distributed Morphology, with its Vocabulary and Encyclopedia, is conceptually superior to Lexicalist theories.”

"No Escape From Syntax: Don't Try Morphological Analysis in the Privacy of Your Own Lexicon", Alec Marantz

[allthingslinguistic]

Here’s a useful overview of Distributed Morphology from one of the main linguists who works in DM, Rolf Noyer. 

You won’t see DM in an intro linguistics course, but it’s quite a neat theory. The main premises, from Wikipedia: 

The central claim of Distributed Morphology is that there is no divide between the construction of words and sentences. The syntax is the single generative engine that forms sound-meaning correspondences - morphology does not exist in a separate component from the syntax.

This approach challenges the traditional notion of the lexicon as the unit where derived words are formed and idiosyncratic word-meaning correspondences are stored. In Distributed Morphology there is no unified Lexicon as in earlier generative treatments of word-formation. Rather, the functions that other theories ascribe to the Lexicon are distributed among other components of the grammar.

One of the key observations of DM is that both morphemes and words can combine together either predictably or idiomatically. 

For example, the meaning of “I opened the window” is can be determined from the meanings of the individual words and their relative positions, but “I let the cat out of the bag” has an additional meaning (I told a secret) that has nothing to do with cats or bags. 

Similarly, with words, a “doghouse” is a house for dogs, but a “blackboard” can be green or another colour. 

DM is particularly useful for languages that have a more extensive inventory of morphemes than English, because something that’s a series of words in English can be a single word in another language, or vice versa. Here’s another fairly accessible paper about Distributed Morphology.