Morphemes without Morphs: A Theory of Syntactic Arrangements and Phonological Processes

The thesis presents the theory of Morphemes without Morphs (MWM). Words are argued to be made up of abstract items (morphemes), arranged into hierarchical structures; however, these items do not stand in a straightforward exponence relationship with phonological pieces. Abstract morphemes are visible in the phonology, and condition the application of base-altering morphological realization rules, assumed to be a subset of the ordinary rules of the phonology. Application of morphological realization rules requires the conditioning morpheme to be suitably local to the base; deletion of inner morphemes will cause more peripheral morphemes to become suitably local in the course of a derivation. Rules are extrinsically ordered, but the attestable orderings are highly constrained, due to the above considerations. A subset of rules is designated as cyclic, with such rules applying before the noncyclic ones; this conception of cyclicity allows the theory to account for classic Mirror Principle effects, which would otherwise pose a problem. The theory is applied to a range of morphological phenomena: mobile affixation, Mirror Principle violations, exceptional triggering in morphophonology, and others. Implications for the relationship between morphology and phonology are discussed; since MWM treats morphological realization rules as a kind of phonological rule, and since these rules are extrinsically ordered, a wider range of interactions between morphology and phonology is predicted than is usually assumed; it is argued that this prediction is borne out. The theory offers a straightforward solution to the problem of nonconcatenative morphology, while maintaining the hypothesis that the terminal nodes of syntactic structures are morphemes, not words. In contrast to current approaches that adopt the Concatenativist Hypothesis, this thesis takes the A-Morphous view that the phonological material of a word (segments, autosegments, etc.) cannot be divided into units with morphological affiliation—but crucially departs from this view in recognizing the existence of abstract morphological structure. The theory thus brings together schools of thought usually considered to be opposed: in its syntactic assumptions, MWM belongs to the “item-and-arrangement” camp of morphological theory; but in its phonological assumptions, the theory has decidedly “item-and-process” inclinations.Ph.D