Morphology: why, how, when, when not, and why not?

Abstract

In the seventies and eighties, the typical research question of psycholinguists interested in morphology was on whether or not morphological structure plays a role in on-line processing in language comprehension and speech production. It has become clear that this research question, which from a linguistic perspective has always been extremely naive, is also quite unproductive from a psychological point of view. Fortunately, a much wider range of issues is currently under investigation. A picture of morphological processing in the mental lexicon is now emerging in which the relevance of morphology is not an all or nothing issue. Instead, the functionality of morphological structure is now seen as hinging on a delicate balance of a series of factors. The goal of this paper is to outline the kinds of factors and their interrelations that are currently investigated experimentally. In this way, we hope to provide a frame of reference for the papers in this volume of the Yearbook of Morphology that are based on a workshop held at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in June, 1995, under the title ‘Morphology: why, how, when, when not, and why not’. We will first sketch three central psychological issues, and then proceed to a series of linguistically motivated topics.