7 Morphology and Syntax
We saw in Chapter 6 that inflection and syntax are intimately related to one another. Inflection, we said, is the realization of morphosyntactic features through morphological means. Morphosyntax deals with the relationship and interactions between morphology and syntax. In this chapter we explore a variety of topics in morphosyntax, including morphologists’ and syntacticians’ definitions of inflection, structural constraints on morphological inflection, inflection and universal grammar, and grammatical-function-changing morphology. Since our target audience consists of students whose only exposure to syntax comes from an introductory course in general linguistics, we avoid bringing in advanced syntactic analyses.
7.1 Morphological vs. Syntactic Inflection
We begin by distinguishing between two applications of the word inflection, one found chiefly in the morphological literature and the other in syntactic literature. For a morphologist, the presence of inflectional morphology in a language depends on the existence ...
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