The model of constructive morphology has been widely adopted in
recent morphosyntactic research in LFG, especially in the areas of
case marking (Nordlinger (1998a, b), Lee (1999,2002), Sharma (1999)) and the encoding of
tense, aspect and mood information on non-head constituents (Barron
1998, Sadler 1998, Nordlinger and Sadler 2000). One of the central tenets of
this approach is the Principle of Morphological Composition (PMC)
(Nordlinger 1998a) which constrains the interaction of f-structure
information contributed by the morphology, such that the structure
built by any given affix is outside that built by the stem to which it
is attached. The PMC as
presently formulated, however, makes crucial reference to a morphemic,
word-syntax approach to morphology and thus suffers from the many
shortcomings of morpheme-based approaches (e.g. Stump 2001). In this paper we show
how the insights of the PMC can be combined with the
inferential-realisational approach of Paradigm Function Morphology
(Stump 2001). This not only brings constructive morphology into step
with much other recent work in LFG morphology, which has favoured the
realisational view (e.g. Börjars, Vincent and Chapman 1997,
Sadler and Spencer 2001, Sells 2001, Ackerman and Stump (forthcoming)
and others), but also provides a more natural account for many
empirical facts not adequately addressed by the morpheme-based
model.
References