A MaS State of Mind

Abstract: MaS (“Morphology as Syntax”) is a framework for the analysis of so-called morphological phenomena developed in Collins and Kayne (2023) and the papers cited there. Without going into any technical proposals, I will cover some general ways in which MaS is more than a framework, but also a state of mind. Surprisingly, most of these high-level properties distinguish MaS from DM (“Distributed Morphology”) to some extent, as will be discussed below.

1. The questions asked guide technical results.

In MaS, the guiding question is whether so-called morphological phenomena have syntactic explanations. By starting with that question, you are forced to look deeply for syntactic solutions and to evaluate them. It is completely irrelevant whether you can throw together a technical non-syntactic approach. Accounting for the data in a technical way is often equivalent to a description of the data, without necessarily providing any deeper insights.

In comparison, the guiding question in DM seems to be the following: What is the structure of the morphological component? On that way of looking at things, a morphological component is presupposed, and then one just needs to explore it, articulate it and populate it with further mechanisms. For any given analysis, there is no problem with postulating a particular post-syntactic mechanism, since the morphological component is characterized by post-syntactic mechanisms.

2. Openness to syntax

MaS seeks to develop syntactic approaches to traditionally morphological issues, no matter how authoritative or how widely adopted the current non-syntactic approaches might be. 

An important caveat is in order. In investigating so-called morphological phenomena from a syntactic point of view, it might eventually be necessary to make changes to syntactic theory. In effect, investigating so-called morphological phenomena from a syntactic point of view will lead to better theory of syntax, and it might not be the one we have today.

DM takes a much more conservative approach to syntax. When faced with a mismatch between the output of syntactic rules and the surface forms, DM will use that mismatch to argue for post-syntactic mechanisms, instead of reevaluating the syntactic mechanisms, principles and structures. In other words, DM shifts the investigation of mismatches from syntax to the morphological component. DM is also syntactically conservative in the sense of postulating complex morphological representations (bundles of features) instead of ramified syntactic representations. Lastly, DM is syntactically conservative in excluding from syntactic representations a large class of ‘ornamental’ (or ‘dissociated’) morphemes: case, agreement, theme vowels, etc. These morphemes are added by post-syntactic operations. 

3. Decomposing as far as possible

A characteristic of MaS is the relentless drive to decompose words as far as possible into individual morphemes. The goal is to understand the properties of words in terms of their morphological decomposition. The closer one is able to get to the full decomposition, the deeper the understanding will be.

For example, the present tense form of the copula are appears to be a highly irregular suppletive form. But calling are a suppletive form raises the question of why the phonological form is are, instead of bloop or some other random phonological form. 

Furthermore, there is evidence that are is bimorphemic. First, the contracted form is -re: They’re here. If a-re is bimorphemic, the contracted form is simply the second morpheme of the decomposition. There is no reason to postulate any kind of irregular phonological truncation to get from are to -re. 

In fact, such a decompositional analysis leads to a natural proposal: Most English auxiliary verbs are (at least) bimorphemic, and their clitic forms are always the second morpheme. For example, just like a-re is bimorphemic, so is wi-ll and the clitic form is -ll as in I’ll be late. Similarly, has should be decomposed as ha-s, because of forms like He’s already seen it. 

Second, the past tense of a-re is we-re, which transparently involves the same morpheme -re that is found in the present. If are were a suppletive form of be, it is unclear why it would have component morphemes.

Third, the whole series of copula forms is mirrored closely by the possessor pronouns: you-r hat, ou-r hat, thei-r hat (Bernstein and Tortora 2005). This parallelism again suggests that a-re should be decomposed. On this way of looking at things, a-re is not a suppletive form of be at all, but is actually bimorphemic. 

The next question is whether -a or -re or neither corresponds to be, and what the syntactic labels, syntactic positions and semantic values of these three different morphemes are. Furthermore, how are the morphemes combined in a syntactic derivation? As can be seen from the example, relentless decomposition will often lead to syntactically highly ramified structures, leading us back to point 2 above (“Openness to Syntax”).

Another important question is what prevents the copula be from being used as an inflected verb: *He bes happy. In MaS there is no competition between forms, so it cannot be that the case that one form outcompetes the other. Rather, there must be some independent reason why bes is unacceptable (independent of the existence of the finite form). But crucially all of these difficult and interesting questions only arise on the MaS approach. In other words, MaS promotes thinking of the issues from a syntactic perspective.

In DM, there is no theoretical pressure to decompose as far as possible (in terms of separate morphemes). The foundational operation of DM (Late Insertion) allows morphological feature bundles of arbitrary complexity to be realized by phonological forms. There is no motivation to separate those feature bundles into different morphemes. Because of this MaS and DM have very different styles of analysis.

4. Digging deeply into syntax

The standard method in work on morphology of taking a single morphological paradigm (e.g., subject-verb agreement or case-declension class) and analyzing it for different patterns (e.g., syncretism) is not so interesting from the MaS point of view. Rather, establishing such a paradigm is just the start of the process. The next step is to dig deeply into a language to explain the paradigm in terms of the syntactic properties of the language. In general, in order to understand the morphology of a language, it will be necessary to have a very deep knowledge of the syntax of the language (since morphology is just syntax, after all).

To take an example, the second plural and third plural verb forms are syncretic in Latin American Spanish. Just stipulating the syncretism via some technical non-syntactic mechanism gives very little insight into the facts. The real question is how this syncretism is related to syntax. For example, how is the syncretism related to the existence of pronominal forms like usted and ustedes in all dialects of Spanish? These forms have the property that they refer to the addressee, but they have third person phi-feature values. In other words, they are “imposters” in the sense of Collins and Postal 2012. See Collins and Ordóñez 2021 for a detailed analysis of these issues in the MaS framework.

Since DM is based on the premise that there is a separate morphological component (independent from syntax), and the goal is to articulate this morphological component, there is no pressure from within the theory to link morphological proposals to independent syntactic facts.

5. Phonology Matters

The MaS toolkit includes phonological operations, principles and representations. These tools are not part of syntax, but they are not in the morphological component either. In analyzing data from the MaS point of view, phonological considerations often help to clarify underlying representations. They also help to distinguish two morphemes that otherwise appear to be identical phonetically (in considerations of anti-homophony). But more than that, it is sometimes the case that a purely phonological analysis can be found for so-called morphological phenomena.

6. Occam’s Razor

“Occam’s razor is a principle of theory construction or evaluation according to which, other things equal, explanations that posit fewer entities, or fewer kinds of entities, are to be preferred to explanations that posit more.” (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Occams-razor)

In the case of syntax and morphology, if you can give an explanation for a set of data purely on the basis of syntactic operations and principles, then that is to be preferred to an explanation that also makes reference to morphological operations and principles, in accordance with Occam’s razor.

At the very least, if you deviate from a syntactic explanation, that should be justified. There should be an argument for one over the other, or an argument that the syntactic explanation is not viable.

7. Overly powerful theories are not explanatory.

The purpose of a theory is to shed light on the world, and to provide insight into how it works. It is not the purpose of a theory to provide a precise account for lots of different facts. It is not the case that if theory T1 accounts for more data than theory T2, then T1 is superior to T2. If you have a theory that is so powerful that it affords an easy way to account for any particular fact, that should raise warning signs. Or to put it a different way, overly powerful theories are not explanatory, they are merely descriptive.

References

Bernstein, Judy and Christina Tortora. 2005. Two Types of Possessive Forms in English. Lingua 

115, 1221-1242.

Collins, Chris and Richard S. Kayne. 2023. Towards a Theory of Morphology as Syntax. Studies 

in Chinese Linguistics 44.1.

Collins, Chris and Francisco Ordóñez. 2021. Spanish usted as an Imposter. Probus, 1-21.

Embick, David. 2015. The morpheme: A theoretical introduction. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

Embick, David and Rolf Noyer. 2007. Distributed Morphology and the Syntax-Morphology Interface. Gillian Ramchand and Charles Reiss (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Halle, Morris and Alec Marantz. 1993. Distributed Morphology and the Pieces of Inflection. In Kenneth Hale and Samuel J. Keyser (eds.), The View from Building 20. MIT Press, Cambridge.