A-Morphous Morphology

Book excerpt: In A-Morphous Morphology, Stephen Anderson presents a theory of word structure which relates to a full generative grammar of language. He holds word structure to be the result of interacting principles from a number of grammatical areas, and thus not localized in a single morphological component. Dispensing with classical morphemes, the theory instead treats morphology as a matter of rule-governed relations, minimizing the non-phonological internal structure assigned to words and eliminating morphologically motivated boundary elements. Professor Anderson makes the further claim that the properties of individual lexical items are not visible to, or manipulated by, the rules of the syntax, and assimilates to morphology special clitic phenomena. A-Morphous Morphology maintains significant distinctions between inflection, derivation, and compounding, in terms of their place ina grammar. It also contains discussion of the implications of this new A-Morphous position analysis of word structure.