Syntactically arbitrary inflectional morphology

Abstract

What is the relation between the formal categories of inflectional morphology and the structures revealed by a syntactic analysis of the sentences, phrases, etc. within which they occur in language? There is a clear temptation in analyzing a language to take its morphology absolutely at face value as an indicator of sentence structure. I will argue here, though, that this temptation should be resisted, since morphology is often systematically misleading as a guide to syntactic form. In making this point, my goal is by no means to denigrate morphology: what I intend, rather, is to urge that it be taken seriously in its own right, and not treated as a sort of ‘poor man’s syntax’.

This work was supported in part by grant BNS-89-10656 from the National Science Foundation to the Johns Hopkins University. Previous versions have been presented to the Symposium on Inflectional Classes at the 1991 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America and to the First Plenary Meeting of the European Science Foundation’ Programme in Language Typology, II Ciocco, Italy in May, 1991. I have benefited greatly from comments received from the audiences at these occasions, and especially from Mark Baker’s comments at the Inflectional Classes Symposium which appear in this volume.