Distributed Morphology:

Frequently Asked Questions List

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What is Distributed Morphology?

How is DM different from other theories of the architecture of grammar?

Late Insertion refers to the hypothesis that the phonological expression of syntactic terminals is in all cases provided in the mapping to Phonological Form (PF). In other words, syntactic categories are purely abstract, having no phonological content. Only after syntax are phonological expressions, called Vocabulary Items, inserted in a process called Spell-Out.

Underspecification of Vocabulary items means that phonological expressions need not be fully specified for the syntactic positions where they can be inserted. Hence there is no need for the phonological pieces of a word to supply the morphosyntactic features of that word; rather Vocabulary items are in many instances default signals inserted where no more specific form is available.

Syntactic Hierarchical Structure All the Way Down entails that elements within syntax and within morphology enter into the same types of constituent structures (such as can be diagrammed through binary branching trees). DM is piece-based in the sense that the elements of both syntax and of morphology are understood as discrete instead of as (the results of) morphophonological processes.



What happened to the Lexicon?

Because there is no Lexicon in DM, the term lexical item has no significance in the theory, nor can anything be said to 'happen in the Lexicon', nor can anything be said to be 'lexical' or 'lexicalized.' Because of the great many tasks which the Lexicon was supposed to perform, the terms 'lexical' and 'lexicalized' are in fact ambiguous (Aronoff 1994).

Lexical(ized) = Idiomatized. Because the Lexicon was supposed to be a storehouse for sound-meaning correspondences, if an expression is said to be 'lexicalized' the intended meaning may be that the expression is listed with a specialized meaning. In DM such an expression is an idiom and requires an Encyclopedia entry.

Lexical(ized) = Not constructed by Syntax. The internal structure of expressions is not always a product of syntactic operations. In DM structure can be produced both in syntax and after syntax in a component called Morphology (see How are the pieces of words put together?). Nevertheless, because of 'Syntactic Hierarchical Structure all the Way Down', operations within Morphology still manipulate what are essentially syntactic structural relations.

Lexical(ized) = Not subject to exceptionless phonological processes, i.e. part of 'lexical' phonology in the theory of Lexical Phonology and Morphology (Kiparsky 1982 et seq.).

In DM the distinction between two types of phonology -- 'lexical' and 'postlexical' -- is abandoned. All phonology occurs in a single post-syntactic module. While Lexical Phonology and Morphology produced many important insights, DM denies that these results require an architecture of grammar which divides phonology into a pre-syntactic and post-syntactic module. Rather, post-syntactic Phonology itself may have a complex internal structure (Halle & Vergnaud 1987).

What are morphemes?

What are Vocabulary items?

Vocabulary item schema

signal <--> context of insertion

(phonological exponent)

Example vocabulary items

/i/ <--> [___, +plural]

A Russian affix (Halle 1997)

/n/ <--> [___, +participant +speaker, plural]

A clitic in Barceloni Catalan (Harris 1997a)

/y-/ <--> elsewhere

An affix in the Ugaritic prefix conjugation (Noyer 1997)

zero <--> 2 plu

A subpart of a clitic in Iberian Spanish (Harris 1994)



What kinds of morphemes are there?

Harley & Noyer 1998 propose that morphemes are of two basic kinds: f-morphemes and l-morphemes, corresponding approximately to the conventional division between functional and lexical categories.

F-morphemes are defined as morphemes for which there is no choice as to Vocabulary insertion. In othe words, f-morphemes are those whose content suffices to determine a unique phonological expression. The spell-out of an f-morpheme is said to be deterministic.

In contrast, an l-morpheme is defined as one for which there is a choice in spell-out. For example, in an l-morpheme corresponding to what would be pretheoretically called a 'noun' there might be inserted the pieces dog, cat, fish, mouse, table etc. Because the labels noun, verb, adjective etc. are by hypothesis not present in syntax, the widely adopted hypothesis that Prosodic Domain construction should be oblivious to such distinctions (Selkirk 1986, Chen 1987) follows automatically.



Does DM use conventional syntactic categories like Noun and Verb?

Specifically, the different 'parts of speech' can be defined as a single l-morpheme type, called Root (Pesetsky 1995), in certain local relations with category-defining f-morphemes. For example, a 'noun' or a 'nominalization' is a Root whose nearest c-commanding f-morpheme (or licenser) is a Determiner, a 'verb' is a Root whose nearest c-commanding f-morphemes are v, Aspect and Tense; without Tense such a Root is simply a 'participle'.

Thus, the same Vocabulary item may appear in different morphological categories depending on the syntactic context that the item's l-morpheme (or Root) appears in. For example, the Vocabulary item destroy appears as a 'noun' destruct-(ion) when its nearest licenser is a Determiner, but the same Vocabulary item appears as a 'participle' destroy-(ing) when its nearest licensers are Aspect and v; if Tense appears immediately above Aspect, then the 'participle' becomes a 'verb' such as destroy-(s).

However, it is probably the case that many traditional parts of speech labels correspond to language-specific features present after syntax conditioning various morphological operations such as Impoverishment and Vocabulary Insertion.



How are the pieces of words put together?

The expression cows: Morphosyntactic description: [Root [+plural]] Morphophonological description: [kaw+ z]

How are the morphemes of an expression put together?

Dissociated Morphemes. First, morphemes such as 'passive' or 'case' (in some instances, see Marantz 1991) which, by hypothesis, do not figure in syntax proper, can be inserted after syntax but before Spell-Out. These morphemes, which only indirectly reflect syntactic structures, are called Dissociated morphemes (Embick 1997).

Second, the constituent structure of morphemes can be modified by Morphological Merger,which can effect relatively local morpheme displacements.



How are the phonological pieces of an expression put together?

Is there a syntactic terminal for every piece of a word? Don't we have too many functional projections already?

What are idioms in DM?

Some idioms cat (a fuzzy animal)

(the) veil (vows of a nun)

(rain) cats and dogs (a lot)

(talk) turkey (honest discourse)

What is the Encyclopedia?

If Vocabulary insertion does not occur until after syntax, and Vocabulary is not present at LF, how is the meaning of expressions determined?

Do theta-roles figure in DM?

How does Spell-Out work?

How does Spell-Out of f-morphemes work?

Subset Principle. 'The phonological exponent of a Vocabulary item is inserted into a morpheme... if the item matches all or a subset of the grammatical features specified in the terminal morpheme. Insertion does not take place if the Vocabulary item contains features not present in the morpheme. Where several Vocabulary items meet the conditions for insertion, the item matching the greatest number of features specified in the terminal morpheme must be chosen.'

Example (Sauerland 1995). Dutch strong adjectival desinences [-neuter] [+neuter]

[-pl] -e zero

[+pl] -e -e Vocabulary Items zero <--> [___, +neuter -plural] / Adj + ____

-e <--> Adj + ____



How does Spell-Out of l-morphemes work?

Which Vocabulary item wins if the features of two Vocabulary items competing for insertion into the same morpheme are not in a subset/superset relation?

Fragment of the Hierarchy of Features 1 person > 2 person > dual > plural > other features

How is allomorphy obtained?

Suppletive allomorphy occurs where different Vocabulary items compete for insertion into an f-morpheme. For example, Dutch nouns have (at least) two plural number suffixes, -en and -s. The conditions for the choice are partly phonological and partly idiosyncratic. Since -en and-s are not plausibly related phonologically, they must constitute two Vocabulary items in competition.

Morphophonological allomorphy occurs where a single Vocabulary item has various phonologically similar underlying forms, but where the similarity is not such that Phonology can be directly responsible for the variation. For example, destroy and destruct- represent stem allomorphs of a single Vocabulary item; the latter allomorph occurs in the nominalization context. DM hypothesizes that in such cases there is a single basic allomorph, and the others are derived from it by a rule of Readjustment. The Readjustment in this case replaces the Rime of the final syllable of destroy with -uct.



What criteria differentiate between Suppletion and Morphophonological Allomorphy?

If DM is 'piece-based' how is 'process' morphology handled?

First, since Readjustment can affect only individual Vocabulary items and not strings of these, it is predicted that 'process' morphology is always a kind of allomorphy (see also Lieber 1981). For example, Marantz 1992 shows that truncation applies to (Papago) O'odham verb stems to produce a separate stem allomorph; it does not affect more than one Vocabulary item at once.

Second, since processes produce allomorphs but do not directly 'discharge' features, it is common for an allomorph to have several contexts of use. For example, in Papago the truncated verb stem allomorph has several functions, including but not limited to its use in the perfective form, and the property of perfectivity is primarily expressed in another morpheme, namely an affix on the syntactic auxiliary. It is therefore incorrect to directly equate truncation and the perfective; rather, truncation applies to verb stems which appear in the perfective.



What kind of language would be possible in a process-based morphology but impossible in DM?

Singular and plural nouns in the pseudo-language 'Martian'

singular plural takata taka earthling

takata-ri takata earthling-genitive

laami laa antenna

jankap jan flying saucer

jankap-ri janka flying saucer-genitive

zuuk lorp canal

zuuk-ri zuu canal-genitive

yuun-i yuu antenna waving

(cf. yuun 'wave antennas')

merg-i mer canal digging

(cf. merg 'dig a canal')

merg-i-ri mergi canal digging-genitive



The 'Martian' rule of plural formation is easy to express in a process-morphology: instead of adding an affix, one simply deletes the final syllable. In DM however, this language could never be generated, because processes like 'delete the final syllable' could only be expressed as Readjustments which affect individual Vocabulary items.



What is Morphological Merger?

Morphological Merger

At any level of syntactic analysis (d-structure, s-structure, phonological structure), a relation between X and Y may be replaced by (expressed by) the affixation of the lexical head of X to the lexical head of Y.

Merger has different consequences depending upon the level of representation it occurs at. Where Merger applies in syntax proper it is the equivalent of Head Movement, adjoining a zero-level projection to a governing zero-level projection (Baker 1988). Syntactic Lowering may be a type of Merger as well, presumably occuring after syntax proper but before Vocabulary Insertion. See Bobaljik 1994.

The canonical use of Merger in Morphology is to express second-position effects. Embick & Noyer (in progress) hypothesize that where Merger involves particular Vocabulary items (as opposed to morphemes), the items in question must be string-adjacent; such cases of Merger are called Local Dislocation. Schematically Local Dislocation looks like this:

Local Dislocation:

X [Y ... ] --> [Y + X ...

Local Dislocation has also received considerable attention outside of DM from researchers working in Autolexical Syntax (Sadock 1991).

For example, Latin -que is a second-position clitic which adjoins to the left of the zero-level element to its right (* represents the relation of string adjacency; Q represents dissociated morphemes):

[[A Q] [N-Q]] [cl [[A-Q] [N-Q]]] Mophological structure

[[bon i] [puer i]] [-que [[bon ae] [puell ae]]] Vocabulary insertion

[[bon*i]*[puer*i]]*[-que* [[bon*ae]*[puell*ae]]] Linearization

[[bon*i]*[puer*i]]* [[[bon*ae] *que] * [puell*ae]]] Local dislocation

good-nom.pl boy-nom.pl good-nom.pl-and girl-nom.pl

'Good boys and good girls'

By hypothesis, Prosodic Inversion (Halpern 1995) is a distinct species of Merger at the level of PF, and differs from Local Dislocation in that the affected elements are prosodic categories rather than morphological ones.

For example, Schuetze 1994, expanding on Zec & Inkelas 1990, argues that the auxiliary clitic je in Serbo-Croatian is syntactically in C, but inverts with the following Phonological Word by Prosodic Inversion at PF (parentheses below denote Phonological Word boundaries):

je [ [U ovoj sobi PP] klavir VP] syntactic structure

je (U ovoj)(sobi)(klavir) parse into Phonological Words

((U ovoj)+je)(sobi)(klavir) Prosodic Inversion

In this AUX room piano

'In this room is the piano'

By hypothesis, the positioning of the clitic cannot be stated in terms of a (morpho)syntactic constituent, since U ovoj 'in this' does not form such a constituent. Izvorski & Embick 1995 specifically argue that syntactic explanations, including those involving remnant extraposition, cannot reasonably be held accountable for this pattern.

However, it should be emphasized that the extent to which Local Dislocation and Prosodic Inversion are distinct devices in the mapping to PF remains controversial.



What is Impoverishment?

Example (Sauerland 1995).

The adjectival sufixes in Norwegian. STRONG [-neuter] [+neuter]

[-pl] zero t

[+pl] e e WEAK [-neuter] [+neuter]

[-pl] e e

[+pl] e e

/t/ <--> [___, -pl +neut] / Adj + ____

zero <--> [___, -pl -neut] / Adj + ____

/e/ <--> elsewhere / Adj + ____

[±neuter] --> null

Impoverishment thus guarantees that both the Vocabulary items t and zero cannot be inserted, since both require explicit reference to a value for [±neuter]. Insertion of the general case, namely -e, follows automatically.



What kinds of Impoverishment rules are there?

2 --> 2

|

=

|

pl

|

f

Noyer 1997 rejects the use of geometries of this sort as too restrictive, and proposes instead that Impoverishments are better understood as feature-cooccurrence restrictions or filters of the type employed by Calabrese 1995 for phonological segment inventories. For example, the absence of a first person dual in Arabic is represented as the filter *[1 dual], and a Universal Hierarchy of Features dictates that where these features combine, because [dual] is a number feature and [1] is a (hierarchically higher) person feature, [dual] is deleted automatically. Calabrese 1994 and 1996 further expand this idea.

The use of feature geometries in DM remains an unresolved issue at this time, but Feature Hierarchies, whether geometric or not, ensure that normally more marked feature values persist in contexts of neutralization.



Does Impoverishment ever involve rules that change morphosyntactic feature values?

What is Fission?

For example, in the prefix-conjugation of Tamazight Berber, the AGR morpheme can appear as one, two or three separate Vocabulary items, and these may appear as prefixes or as suffixes:

Tamazight Berber Prefix Conjugation. dawa 'cure' singular plural 3m i-dawa dawa-n

3f t-dawa dawa-n-t

2m t-dawa-d t-dawa-m

2f t-dawa-d t-dawa-n-t

1 dawa-g n-dawa

Vocabulary items /n-/ <--> 1 pl

/-g/ <--> 1

/t-/ <--> 2

/t-/ <--> 3 sg f

/-m/ <--> pl m (2)

/i-/ <--> sg m

/-d/ <--> sg (2)

/-n/ <--> pl

/-t/ <--> f



In a form like t-dawa-n-t 'you (fem pl) cure' has three affixes, t-, -n, and-t. The affixes are added in an order determined by the Feature Hierarchy. Hence t- '2' is added first, then -n 'plural', and finally -t 'feminine.'

In a form like n-dawa 'we cure' there is but one affix. By discharging the feature '1', the insertion of n- '1 pl' prevents the subsequent insertion of -g '1'. This illustrates that two Vocabulary items can be disjunctive not by competing for the same position-of-exponence, but rather by competing for the discharge of the same feature. Such cases are termed Discontinuous Bleeding.

Some features in the above Vocabulary item list are in parentheses. This notation denotes that the Vocabulary item in question can be inserted only if the parenthesized feature has already been discharged, whereas the features which are not in parentheses cannot already have been discharged if insertion is to occur. For example, -m can be inserted only on a verb to which t- '2' has already been attached. Thus features conditioning the insertion of a Vocabulary item come in two types. A Vocabulary item primarily expresses the non-parenthesized features in its entry, but it secondarily expresses the parenthesized features (or any features belonging to other morphemes which are required for insertion of the item). In other words, the parenthesized features must be primarily expressed by some other Vocabulary item. This distinction corresponds (approximately) to the distinction between primary and secondary exponence (Carstairs 1987).



How do paradigms figure in the DM model?

What is Separationism?

Theories endorsing Separationism are attractive because (a) they allow similar syntactico-semantic forms to be realized in quite different ways phonologically and (b) they permit polyfunctionality of phonological expressions: a single phonological piece (e.g. the English affix -s) might correspond to a set of distinct and unrelated syntactico-semantic functions.

Theories endorsing Separation are unattractive for exactly the same reasons as above: when unconstrained, they fail to make any interesting predictions about the degree to which syntactico-semantic and phonological form can diverge. See Embick 1997, 1998a, 1998b.



Is there any difference between inflectional and derivational morphology in DM?

How are clitics analyzed in DM?

Leaners (Zwicky 1985a) are Vocabulary items which cannot form Phonological Words by themselves but whose morphemes have no other special displacement properties. For example, the English reduced auxiliary -s (from is) 'promiscuously' attaches to any phonological host to its left (Zwicky & Pullum 1983):

The person I was talking to 's going to be angry with me. Any answer not entirely right 's going to be marked as an error.

Types of phonologicalclitics

{ = phrase boundary, ( = word boundary {...free clitic {(host)...}}

{...(affixal clitic (host))...}

{...(internal clitic + host)...}

Second-position clitics are Vocabulary items which undergo either Local Dislocation or Prosodic Inversion with a host.

Syntactic clitics. Finally, the term 'clitic' is sometimes used to describe syntactically mobile heads, typically Determiners, such as certain Romance pronominals on some accounts. In such cases the dependency relation or special behavior is a syntactic property of a morpheme (syntactic category). In many cases the Vocabulary items which are inserted into these morphemes also show either phonological dependency as leaners or additional peculiarities of position via Local Dislocation or Prosodic Inversion. See Harris 1994, 1997a and Embick 1995 for case studies.



How can I find out more about DM?

Please direct questions or comments about this page to Rolf Noyer.



