Three models of the morphology-syntax interface

Nearly from the beginning, generative grammar has struggled, sometimes silently, to reconcile the various notions of word. An important dimensionality of the theories In syntax concerns the "atomicity" of words. At one pole on this dimension, the "atomic" end, words, complex or not, occupy syntactic positions and have syntactic properties; how the words come to have those properties does not concern the rules of syntax. On the other "interactive" end, the derivation of the properties of words and the derivation of the properties of sentences are intermingled in various ways; in one concrete version, affixes occupy positions in syntax, and affixation Is a sentence level process. What I have called THUD ("The Theory Under Discussion"), beginning with "Remarks" and continuing on until now, has moved between these two poles. Pollock (1989) Chomsky (1957), and others proposed a rather interactive model; in that model, functional elements like Tense occupy syntactic positions; lexical Items like verbs move to those positions to get those elements. In a real sense, affixes are associated directly with syntactic positions: the English tense ending ed is a functional head which acquires its base verb through syntactic derivation. In examining these models, It Is useful to keep three questions in mind: first, how is morphology added to the verb; second, how does morphology determine the positioning of verbs and their arguments; and third, how does morphology determine the positioning of adjuncts relative to verbs and arguments. The questions are a bit arbitrary, but have the virtue that little falls outside of them.