Morphology

Within linguistics, morphology is the subdiscipline devoted to the study of the distribution and form of
“morphemes,” taken to be the minimal combinatorial unit languages use to build words and phrases.
For example, it is a fact about English morphology that information about whether a sentence is in the
past tense occurs at the end of verbs. This fact reduces to a generalization about the distribution of the
tense morpheme in English, which is a fact about “morphotactics” (the distribution and ordering of
morphemes) in morphology. It is also a fact about English morphology that the (“regular”) past-tense
morpheme is pronounced /t/ after a class of voiceless consonants (walked, tipped, kissed) and /d/ after
a class of voiced consonants and after vowels (gagged, ribbed, fizzed, played). This fact is a fact about
“allomorphy” (alternations in the pronunciation of morphemes). Traditionally, then, morphology
concerns itself with morphotactics and allomorphy.

Although the division or decomposition of words and phrases into smaller units seems relatively
intuitive, linguistic morphologists have repeatedly questioned basic assumptions about morphemes.
With one view, instead of dealing with the distribution and pronunciation of small pieces of language,
morphology is about the form of words, where, for example, kick, kicks, kicking, and kicked, are all forms
of the same verb kick (Matthews, 1965) but are not composed of a sequence of morphemes. With this
view, languages are claimed to make a strict distinction between words and phrases, with only the latter
having an internal structure of organized pieces. From this morpheme-less perspective, kicked is a form
of the stem kick, not the combination of kick+past tense, where past tense is realized as /t/. Other
morphologists also endorse a strict division between words and phrases but still analyze words as
consisting of morphemes; with this view, the internal arrangement of morphemes within words falls
under a different set of principles than the arrangement of words into sentences. However, in the
morphological theory most closely associated with generative grammar in this century, distributed
morphology, there is no strict word/phrase distinction (Matushansky & Marantz, 2013). The internal
arrangement of morphemes both within words and within phrases and sentences is explained by a
single syntactic theory, and morphology provides an account of the way in which these morphemes are
realized phonologically (in sound), whether inside words or independently arranged in phrases.

This chapter explains aspects of the theory of morphology with a view of the way that morphology has
been explored in neurolinguistics. An important conclusion of the chapter is that although the types of
investigation of morphology currently found in neurolinguistics might seem to rely on motivated
linguistic distinctions, such as that between derivational and inflectional morphology, linguistic theory
itself does not support such distinctions in the manner required to motivate neurolinguistic
experiments. Although research in the neurobiology of language does at least sometimes adopt the
vocabulary of linguistic morphology in investigating the neural bases of morphology, the attention given
to linguistic analysis is often superficial, with the consequence that experimental results are difficult to
interpret with respect to central questions of language processing in the brain. There is hope that recent
advances in psycholinguistics and in computational linguistics may help bridge the gap between
linguistic theory and the theory of neurolinguistic processing, such that linguistics’ deep understanding
of the nature of language can inform neurolinguistics and, in turn, neurolinguistic findings can help
shape linguistic theory.

Although some controversies within linguistics over the correct analysis of morphological phenomena
are explained in this chapter, in general I adopt the assumptions and results of distributed morphology.
As explained in Marantz (2013b), distributed morphology is relatively conservative from a historical
perspective, preserving the insights of mainstream linguistics from the 20th century. In experimental
work, one can attempt to explicitly test differing predictions made by competing representational
theories of language, and so an experimentalist could choose to pit predictions of distributed
morphology against available alternatives. However, experimental work related to morphology must
make some theoretical commitments; it is not possible to be agnostic over issues such as whether words
decompose into morphemes.