The interface to morphology

Abstract

This chapter examines the place of morphology in the LFG architecture. The chapter assumes a modular view of the morphological component, in line with the overall modular architecture of LFG: the morphological component has its own internal structure and obeys universal and language particular constraints on word formation that need not be shared by other levels of structure. According to this model, the morphological component associates a word form with a set of features representing the morphological structure and grammatical contribution of the word; these features are interpreted at the interface of morphology with the rest of the grammar, producing the lexical entry for the word form. This view fits well with a realizational theory of morphology; the proposals are compatible not only with explicitly paradigm-based models, but with any morphological theory which relates words to feature sets encoding their grammatical properties and structure, including finite state theories of morphology.