Towards a Theory of Morphology as Syntax (2023, Studies in Chinese Linguistics, with Richard Kayne)

Abstract: Phenomena traditionally thought of as morphological can be accounted for in terms of syntactic operations and principles, hence bringing forth questions that traditional morphology fails to ask (for instance, concerning the licensing of empty morphemes). The language faculty contains no specific morphological component, nor any post-syntactic morphological operations.

Link

Morphology as Syntax 5 (University of Delaware, April 16 2027)

The LinguistList announcement for MaS 5 has been launched:

https://linguistlist.org/issues/37/2781/

Please register here:

https://sites.google.com/udel.edu/mas5/registration?authuser=0

Morphology as Syntax 5
Short Title: MaS5
Theme: Reducing morphology entirely to syntax

Date: 16-Apr-2027 - 16-Apr-2027
Location: Newark, Delaware, USA
Contact: Benjamin Bruening
Contact Email: bruening@udel.edu
Meeting URL: https://sites.google.com/udel.edu/mas5/home

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Morphology; Syntax

Submission Deadline: 15-Jan-2027

Seminar: Morphology as Syntax (Fall 2026)

Here is the syllabus for my seminar (co-taught with Richie Kayne) this semester (Fall 2026).

Seminar Syllabus (Fall 2026)

Merge is All You Need: An Esquisse of Morphology as Syntax (talk video)

Merge is All You Need: An Esquisse of Morphology as Syntax

YouTube Video

Chris Collins, New York University

August 24, 2026

Syntactic Pathways to Morphology, Online Lecture Series

Faculty of Philosophy, Languages and Human Sciences

University of São Paulo, Brazil

Merge is All You Need: An Esquisse of Morphology as Syntax (talk handout)

 Merge is All You Need: An Esquisse of Morphology as Syntax

handout

Chris Collins, New York University

August 24, 2026

Syntactic Pathways to Morphology, Online Lecture Series

Faculty of Philosophy, Languages and Human Sciences

University of São Paulo, Brazil

Syntactic Pathways To Morphology Online Lecture Series | Chris Collins (August 24, 2026)

Syntactic Pathways to Morphology (SPTM) is a monthly online lecture series hosted by the Department of Linguistics at the University of São Paulo, bringing together researchers working on the morphology-syntax interface, with a particular focus on syntactic approaches to morphology. Conceived as a forum for scholarly exchange, SPTM fosters discussion on the explanatory power of different theoretical mechanisms within syntactic theory in accounting for morphological phenomena.

Registration

Preliminary Book Proposal: Morphology as Syntax, volumes 1 and 2

 Preliminary Proposal: Morphology as Syntax, Volumes 1 and 2.

Abstract: The proposal is for a two-volume set dedicated to defining and exploring Morphology as Syntax, a new theory about the relationship between morphology and syntax.

Morphology as Syntax Workshop: Past, Present and Future

Goal: The purpose of this conference is to investigate the relationship between morphology and syntax, and in particular to investigate the extent to which morphological generalizations can be accounted for in terms of purely syntactic operations and conditions. 

MaS 6

ELTE Research Center for Linguistics, Budapest (Spring 2028)

Organizers: Marcel Den Dikken and Éva Dékány

MaS 5

University of Delaware (Spring 2027)

Organizer: Benjamin Bruening

MaS 4

Queens College and Stony Brook University (April 17, 2026)

Organizer: Francisco Ordoñez

MaS 3

UQAM (September 15-16, 2023)

Organizers: Tom Leu and Heather Newell

MaS2

UCLA (June 10-11, 2022)

Organizers: Stefan Keine, Hilda Koopman and Harold Torrence

MaS1

NYU (December 4-5, 2020)

Organizers: Chris Collins and Richard Kayne

Morphology as Syntax (MaS) I-III

Here are the links to the first three Morphology as Syntax workshops.  Hopefully, the fourth will be held soon. Keep your eyes open for announcements:

MaS I

MaS II

MaS III

MaS IV (TBA)

For convenience, I also include a link to Collins and Kayne 2023, which is the philosophical foundation of the MaS workshop series:

Collins and Kayne 2023

New Horizons in Morphology as Syntax: My Three Published Papers

MaS (Morphology as Syntax) is a framework which asks the question of whether putative morphological phenomena can be can be accounted for in terms of syntactic principles and operations. In MaS there is no morphological component, nor are there any post-syntactic morphological operations.

So far, I have been able to publish three papers in this framework. I list the papers, and their abstracts below, in chronological order. These three papers are enough to get a general feel for the framework, and some tools to begin working with it.

I would really love to hear from people who are doing work in a related spirt, taking syntax seriously in the analysis of putative morphological generalizations.

1. Spanish usted as an Imposter (2021, Probus, with Francisco Ordóñez)

Abstract: Across dialects, Spanish uses the third person forms usted and ustedes to refer to the addressee. In this squib, we propose an imposter analysis of these forms in the framework of Collins and Postal (2012. Imposters. MIT Press, Cambridge.). (link)

2. Towards a Theory of Morphology as Syntax (2023, Studies in Chinese Linguistics, with Richard Kayne)

Abstract: Phenomena traditionally thought of as morphological can be accounted for in terms of syntactic operations and principles, hence bringing forth questions that traditional morphology fails to ask (for instance, concerning the licensing of empty morphemes). The language faculty contains no specific morphological component, nor any post-syntactic morphological operations. (link)

3. A Syntactic Approach to Case Contiguity (2025, Continua)

Abstract: Building on the empirical results and theoretical insights of Caha (2013), I show howto derive the Case Contiguity Constraint in a syntactic theory of morphology. In particular, I show how to derive *ABA in the domain of case syncretism without appeal to late insertion. (link)

Handouts for MaS Seminar (Fall 2024)

Here are the handouts which I distributed as part of the "Morphology as Syntax" seminar during Fall 2024. I do not include materials that Richie distributed or the student presentations, which were really interesting and very relevant to the goals of the course. As you can see, it was a productive semester, more for consolidating old ideas, than for proposing new ones.

Syllabus (Revised and Final)

The Juncture Morpheme in Kua (September 23 2024)

A Very Short History of MaS (September 24 2024)

Two Allomorphy Models without Late Insertion (September 24 2024)

A Syntactic Approach to Case Contiguity

Forms of the Copula in English

Bare Nominal Passives

A Note on Singular They/Them (November 6 2024)

A Note on Singular They/Them (Addendum November 6 2024)

Overview of Nanosyntax (from the Perspective of MaS) (November 11 2024)

Romance s-Forms as Imposters (November 20 2024)

Allomorphy without Context: An MaS Alternative (November 27 2024)

A MaS State of Mind (December 9 2024)

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.

Allomorphy without Context: An MaS Alternative

Abstract: Caha et. al. (2024) give an interesting account of the forms of adjectives in Czech. They propose that the different forms of the positive and comparative can be accounted for by a system of portmanteau lexical items, formalized in the Nanosyntax framework. In this squib, I give a alternative account of the data in the MaS (‘Morphology as Syntax’) framework (see Collins and Kayne 2023) without invoking portmanteau or Late Insertion. Rather, the account developed makes crucial use of the licensing of empty elements.

Allomorphy without Context: An MaS Alternative

Romance s-Forms as Imposters

Abstract: In this blog post, I situate the results of Kayne’s (2018) in the imposter framework of Collins and Postal (2012) and Collins and Ordóñez (2021).

Romance s-Forms as Imposters

Overview of Nanosyntax (from the Perspective of MaS) (November 11 2024)

Summary: Nanosyntax is a theory of syntax that assumes late insertion, and phrasal spell-out.

< /blikәt/ ⇔ [ZP Z [YP Y [XP X ]]] ⇔ BLICKET > (Baunaz and Lander 2018: 26)

Example: Russian accusative of ‘lip’ gub-ú (Caha 2020: 30, example (65))

[ACCP F2 [NOMP F1 [#P # [FEMP FEM REF]]]]

Discuss: Superset Principle, Elsewhere Principle, Cyclic Override Principle

Positives:

1. Minimalist (Merge), Cartography, LCA

2. One feature, one head (no bundling)

3. No Morphological Component (no impoverishment, no post-syntactic insertion)

Spellout-Driven Movement

1. Motivated by Spellout (in addition to syntactic movement)

2. Leaves no trace (needed for lexical insertion)

3. Spellout Algorithm/Lexicalization Algorithm (Caha et. al. 2024)

a. Merge F and lexicalize FP

b. If (a) fails, move the Spec of the complement of F, and lexicalize FP

c. If (b) fails, move the complement of F, and lexicalize FP

d. If (c) fails, go back to the previous cycle and try the next option for that cycle

Paval Caha (p.c.): “You need Spec movement before complement movement in all cases where an agglutinative form (derived by complement movement) could have been used, but never is, because there is a portmanteau morpheme.”

Worries:

1. Spellout driven movement seems like a second syntactic system (outside of regular syntax) needed for spell-out. In that way, it is similar to the operations of the morphological component (e.g., impoverishment, post-syntactic movement) in DM.

2. How does compositional semantics work in Nanosyntax?

a. Spell-out driven movement does not leave traces.

b. Lexical insertion introduces conceptual material at the phrasal level.

MaS and Nanosyntax:

Note: NS uses phrasal spell-out, where MaS uses empty elements. 

Hypothesis: For every NS proposal, it is possible to translate that proposal mechanically into an MaS proposal in the following way:

a. If in NS, a lexical item spells out a phrase with one head H as PHON, then in MaS, there is the lexical item {H, PHON}.

b. If in NS, a lexical item spells out a phrase involving two heads H1 and H2 (H1 c-commands H2) as PHON, then in MaS, there is the lexical item {H2, PHON}, and H1 is licensed as an empty element when occurring with H2.

A Very Short History of Mas (Morphology as Syntax)

December 2020

First version of “Towards a Theory of Morphology as Syntax” posted to Lingbuzz.

(published in 2023)

August 2018

Collins’ “The Logical of Contextual Allomorphy” posted to Linguzz. “I explore ways of analyzing contextual allomorphy that eschew reference to competition and blocking.”

December 2016

Kayne’s “What is Suppletive Allomorphy? On ‘went’ and ‘*goed’ in English’ posted to Lingbuzz (published in 2019). “These analyses do not invoke late insertion. It may be that late insertion is systematically unavailable.”

September 28, 2015

The name “Morphology as Syntax (MAS)” is proposed for first time.

December 13, 2012

Considering names for approach:

syntax-based morphology, Merge-based morphology, minimalist morphology

January 14-19, 2012

Long e-mail discussions about English past tense morphology.

January 14, 2012

Long e-mail discussion of “contextual allomorphy” with the conclusion that there is no contextual allomorphy.

Two Allomorphy Models without Late Insertion (Morphology as Syntax)

 Here is a handout from my seminar with Richard Kayne (Morphology as Syntax). On this handout, I outline two approaches to allomorphy not involving late insertion. This list is not meant to be exclusive. In fact, in the very same class period (September 23 2023), I presented yet another completely different model of allomorphy based on autosegmental phonology.

Syllabus: MaS Seminar (Fall 2024)(Collins and Kayne)(Revised Final Version)

 Syllabus MaS Seminar (Fall 2024)

Course Description: 

This seminar will develop the program sketched in Collins and Kayne (2023) (MaS or "Morphology as Syntax").  We will attempt to show that pursuing a syntactic approach to various questions that might otherwise be called ‘morphological’ yields deeper insights than could otherwise be achieved.  

The choice of topics will in part be sensitive to the interests of the students.  Some possible topics include (but are not limited to): grammatical gender and noun class, approaches to allomorphy and syncretism not based on late insertion and competition, the non-existence of post-syntactic operations, the non-existence of suppletion, the licensing of empty elements, merge-based approaches to phonology.

Syllabus: Morphology as Syntax (Fall 2024, NYU) (Collins and Kayne)

This seminar will develop the program sketched in Collins and Kayne (2023) (MaS or "Morphology as Syntax").  We will attempt to show that pursuing a syntactic approach to various questions that might otherwise be called ‘morphological’ yields deeper insights than could otherwise be achieved.  

Syllabus

Fall 2024 Seminar: Morphology as Syntax (Collins and Kayne, NYU)

Course Description: 

This seminar will develop the program sketched in Collins and Kayne (2023) (MaS or "Morphology as Syntax"). We will attempt to show that pursuing a syntactic approach to various questions that might otherwise be called ‘morphological’ yields deeper insights than could otherwise be achieved.