Abstract
Morphology is attracting more and more the interest of linguists. No complete theory of language can develop without a well established theory of word formation. There are many unsolved problems, however, which make any morphological theory a weak theory, badly needing evidence based solutions, some of them crucial to the theory; these are for example, productivity, meaning, constraints, and so on. We are also concerned with the acquisition/learning of the rules of word formation. In this respect we draw out conclusions from other authors' evidence and from our own.
Highlights
In the structuralist period linguistics became a scientific discipline. During this period linguistics succeeded among other things in the identification and analysis of the units of language from the simplest, the phoneme, to the most complex, the sentence, including the intermedíate ones such as the morpheme and the word
In the literature of word formation we find the testimony of parents who assert they have heard their children coin new compound words using productive patterns of the language
Morphological rules need be specified by conditions and constraints in order to avoid overgeneration
Summary
In the structuralist period linguistics became a scientific discipline. During this period linguistics succeeded among other things in the identification and analysis of the units of language from the simplest, the phoneme, to the most complex, the sentence, including the intermedíate ones such as the morpheme and the word. Some consensus has been reached among linguists on some morpho'ogical topics, many problems still remain to be solved, as for example, the configuration of the morphological subcomponent, the relation of the lexical component to the other components of the grammar, the effects of meaning on word formation rules, the syntactic and phonetic constraints, etc. Related to this is the productivity of morphological rules. It will help to produce new alternatives to learn languages, which are more economical in time and effort than those we are using and it will permit its application to artificial intelligence
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