Chapter 4: Morphology

4.6 A note on theoretical issues 
 
Although it may not have struck you while reading the chapter, the approach presented here is 
largely a practical, down-to-earth one, which focuses on the methods and background 
knowledge required to carry out morphological analyses and appreciate the system behind the 

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structures of words. Only very little has been said about the manifold theoretical disputes 
concerning the precise characteristics of this system. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the 
discussion was dominated by the question of whether morphology and word-formation work 
essentially on the basis of principles similar to those postulated for syntax, thus producing 
members of phrasal categories, or whether morphology and word-formation have their basis 
in the lexicon, the storehouse of lexical categories. A more recent controversy concerns the 
format of the system described in this chapter and, specifically, the nature of the 
morphological knowledge which individual speakers and speech communities as a whole 
apparently have at their disposal – otherwise they would constantly coin ill-formed words. For 
a long time, this knowledge was modelled in the form of strict and abstract rules operating 
over entities defined in terms of equally abstract categories; work on morphology was very 
much preoccupied with defining these rules and the prerequisites for their input, and with 
determining the nature of their output. Individual words and how they are coined, used and 
propagated had hardly any role to play in this model. More recently, this approach has been 
rivalled by one which proceeds from the assumption that morphological knowledge is 
available in the form of more flexible schemas (Bybee 2007; Kemmer 2003) or constructions 
(Booij 2010) which are extracted or distilled by speakers from their constant exposure to 
inflected word-forms and complex lexemes (Schmid 2011: 85, 93–95). While these schemas 
provide them with the knowledge to distinguish well-formed from ill-formed novel creations, 
speakers are still free to coin creative new words but will then be more likely to have to face 
the possibility that their creations are not taken up by other speakers and therefore do not 
catch on.