I’m one of the co-editors of a forthcoming Handbook of Distributed Morphology (I’m the junior editor, in the sense that my co-editors are accomplishing way more than me towards getting the volume together. Senior Editors: Artemis Alexiadou, Ruth Kramer, and Isabel Oltra-Massuet.) Collectively, with the help we hope of our chapter writers and the broader community, the editors will put together an introductory chapter that explains some of the basics of DM in the context of the origins of the theory in the 1990’s. I’ll be Blogging some paragraphs for this chapter, in the hopes of generating questions and corrections. Please help!

Distributed Morphology, in particular as presented in Halle & Marantz (1993), emerges from a specific time and place within the trajectory of Generative Grammar: MIT Linguistics in the early 1990’s. The 1980’s at MIT had seen much work centered around the connection between the internal structure of words and the syntax and semantics of the sentences in which the words occurred. This included in particular the issue of whether the order of morphemes in words “mirrored” (to use Muysken’s observation (1981), later popularized by Baker (1985)) the hierarchical structure of sentences syntactically and semantically. And also bracketing paradoxes (Pesetsky (1985), Sproat (1988)). This work, however, was not at the heart of the development of DM. It did, however, rely on the piece-y-ness and abstractness of morphemes, as well as the parallelism if not identity between word structure and sentences structure.

The center of the DM paper was Halle’s concerns about allomorphy. Abstract morphemes distributed in the syntax were at the center of Chomsky’s (1957) Syntactic Structures’ approach to the English auxiliary system. Abstract -en, for example, came with have in a syntactic tree and was spelled out as (mostly) -ed and sometimes -en by context-sensitive phrase structure rules after affix-hopping. In the years after SS, lexicalist approaches to morphemes dominated phonology in particular, where -en and -ed would be separate morphemes in complementary distribution as perfect participle endings. Spell out of abstract morphemes in the SS manner allows for a straightforward approach to syncretism, where more specified allomorphs are inserted into an abstract morpheme position when their environmental requirements are met; elsewhere a default allomorph would appear. For, e.g., the English present tense paradigm, this seems the best analysis of marked -s (for third person singular subjects) and default zero, as opposed to a lexicalist position that needs to postulate 5 distinct zero present tense morphemes to fill out the paradigm.

Halle was working on a proposal that morphemes with suppletive allomorphs should be given the underlying phonological form of Q, a placeholder for phonological features. Then morphophonological rules would spell out the various allomorphs of Q in particular contexts. The Q attached to present tense features, for example, would spell out as -s in the context of third singular features and zero elsewhere. Morphemes without suppletive allomorphs, like progressive -ing – the concrete morphemes – would carry their phonological forms with them in the syntax. In discussions with Morris, although as a card-carrying lexicalist in Lieber’s (1980) sense, believing that morphemes contained phonological forms, I thought that the Q vs. concrete distinction was unnecessary within any theory that allowed Q’s – that allowed the phonological form of a morpheme to be spelled out in the phonology after syntax. If you have Q’s, every morpheme could be a Q, with concrete morphemes simply having only default realizations, not contextually sensitive ones. Once I got to work with Morris on complex inflectional systems with rampant syncretisms, I drank the Q-laid, abandoned the lexicalist assumption about phonological forms, and worked with him on a fully realizational morphology (all Qs all the time). Here we were particularly influenced by Robert Beard’s (e.g., 1986) work.

But the immediate impetus for the work in the original Distributed Morphology paper was Anderson’s A-Morphous Morphology research (1992). Anderson endorsed a realizational approach to inflection, but not to derivation – a split that we would put pressure on in later work but that was not under discussion in the 1993 paper. However, for Anderson the phonological forms of inflectional morphemes were not pieces – not units in the phonology. Rather, they were the by-product of morphophonological rules, identifiable as units by the linguist but not by the grammar. Anderson made two moves. First, he assimilated affixation to so-called “process” morphemes such as reduplication, metathesis, ablaut/umlaut and truncation. Prefixation and suffixation were just the addition or subtraction of phonemes, as in epenthesis. Second, he claimed that the order of overt inflectional material with respect to other such material and with respect to the stem was determined by the (stipulated) order of morphophonological rule blocks, which also served to explain some of the complimentary distribution of inflectional material. This order didn’t “mirror” syntax in any sense, and was in an important sense arbitrary. As part of this system of morphophonological spell-out, Anderson proposed a number of principles that yielded complementary distribution among certain inflectional spell-outs, to explain why we don’t have oxens and mices, for example.

The 1993 paper was clearly a response to Anderson. We re-analyzed illustrative data sets important to his framework from Georgian and Potawatomi and explicitly evaluated his approach to complementary distribution. Meanwhile, of course, research in what has been labelled “prosodic morphology” was demonstrating (e.g., Marantz (1982)) why so-called process morphemes might best be seen as the addition of a piece of phonological material that may have the effect of reducing phonological structure (as in hypocharistics and truncation) or rearranging phonology as in metathesis. We emphasized in the paper, however, that even if the phonological form of some morphemes should be seen as a process rather than as a piece, the processes could be seen to occur in a position in a hierarchical structure that was the spell out of the syntax. That is, process phonology could be considered a morphophonological “piece” in a particular hierarchicacal position within a syntactic tree structure of morphemes.

To be continued…..

Anderson, S. R (1992). A-morphous morphology (Vol. 62). Cambridge University Press.
Baker, M. (1985). The mirror principle and morphosyntactic explanation. Linguistic inquiry, 16(3), 373-415.
Beard, R. (1986). On the separation of Derivation from Morphology: Toward a Lexeme. Indiana University Linguistics Club.
Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.
Halle, M., & Marantz, A. (1993). Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection. Hale, K. & SJ Keyser (eds.), The View from Building 20.
Marantz, A. (1982). Re reduplication. Linguistic inquiry, 13(3), 435-482.
Muysken, P. C. (1981). Quechua causatives and logical form: a case study in markedness.
Pesetsky, D. (1985). Morphology and logical form. Linguistic inquiry, 16(2), 193-246.
Sproat, R. (1988). Bracketing paradoxes, cliticization and other topics: The mapping between syntactic and phonological structure. Morphology and modularity, 339-360.