The morphology–syntax interface

Abstract

The morphology-syntax interface (MSI) has historically been one of the most important and contentious interfaces in formal syntactic theory. This is not because morphology is somehow more important than the other linguistic realms but because the a priori assumptions about the nature of the MSI are often foundational to the architecture of the grammar. Historically, while Chomskyan tradition has assumed a clear division between syntactic phenomena and semantic and phonological phenomena since the 1970s and the time of the Linguistics Wars (Harris 1995), it has always fully incorporated morphological processes. Indeed, in the beginning of the generative tradition, morphology was not a domain unto itself. Instead, any morphological phenomenon was treated as either a phonological phenomenon or a syntactic one (a view that still persists in some models).