Pattern analogy vs. word-internal syntactic structure in West-Greenlandic: Towards a functional definition of morphology

Abstract

In recent years, analogical, word-based approaches to morphology have found new popularity and challenged the “traditional” hypothesis that words are “made up” of smaller constituents. There is a panoply of recent publications devoted to the empirical shortcomings of compositional morphology and the ways in which a word-based account is preferable. (cf. Anderson 1992, Ford & Singh 1991, Ford et al 1997, etc.) While this debate over the nature of morphology is highly justified, it appears that most of those who participate in it, regardless of their belief in morphemes, or lack there of, do so with the common assumption that the principles under which morphology and other parts of grammar operate are the same for all languages. The fact that traditional language typology is almost entirely based on morphological differences would, however, suggest that universality may not be the best working hypothesis (cf. Singh (in press), however, for an attempt to make some sense of this typological diversity).

I am grateful to Jerrold Sadock for providing me not only with delightful west-Grenlandic examples but also much needed and much appreciated support. I would also like to sincerely thank Rajendra Singh without whose input and advice this project would not have been possible. Lastly some of the explorations presented in this article were made with the help of an FCAR grant from the government of Quebec.