1 In Defense of a Morphous Morphology

(1) “If we accept the evidence that the range of morphological possibilities in natural languages includes some processes that cannot properly be represented as the addition of an affix, we must conclude that a general morphological theory should admit both affixational and non-affixational rules. Since a process-based approach naturally accommodates affixation, but not vice versa, the alternative we should prefer is to explore a theory of morphological processes.” Anderson (1992: 68) In (1) Anderson is contrasting process-based approaches to an “affixation-only” program. An “affixation-only ” approach would obviously be wrong if it only predicted the associations in (2) for a given word. (2) [S1] [S2] [S3] (semantic information) [M1] [M2] [M3] (morphosyntactic information) [Ph1] [Ph2] [Ph3] (phonological information) In a morphous approach different types of association are allowed, and some of the information can be missing ([Ph], [M], [S]); [Ph] need not be a segment or a sequence of segments (it can be a phonological feature). Exponence of inflection in amorphous approaches operates on stems and creates stems