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.

The relationship between morphology and syntax has always been a core issue in syntactic theory, starting from Chomsky 1957. As a very simple classical example, the phrase the dog is taken to be syntactically formed by combining the determiner the and the noun dog into a larger phrase (a DP, determiner phrase). But the word dogs is morphologically formed by combining the word dog with the plural suffix -s. This simple example illustrates the difference between syntax and morphology.

In recent years, the mainstream theory of morphology for generative syntacticians has been Distributed Morphology (DM, see Halle and Marantz 1993). DM takes it as foundational that there is a post-syntactic component, called the “morphological component” where various complex post-syntactic operations take place and where morphemes are supplied with their phonological forms (Late Insertion). 

Directly opposed to DM is Morphology as Syntax (MaS), a term coined in Collins and Kayne 2023, and defined as follows:

Morphology as Syntax (MaS)

Morphological generalizations are accounted for in terms of syntactic operations and principles. There is no morphological component in Universal Grammar (UG), nor are there post-syntactic morphological operations. 

In recent years there has been growing interest in MaS, as indicated by the popular series of MaS workshops. MaS1 was at NYU in 2020, MaS2 was at UCLA in 2022, MaS3 was at UQAM in 2023, MaS4 was at Queens College in 2026. In the most recent workshop, there were over 120 people registered (combined Zoom and in-person). Two future MaS conferences are already on the books. More information on the workshop series can be found here:

https://ordinaryworkinggrammarian.blogspot.com/2026/02/morphology-as-syntax-workshop-past.html

The purpose of the planned volumes is to bring the goals and results of the MaS workshops to a wider audience. These volumes would appeal to a wide range of people interested in the relationship between morphology and syntax, including morphologists, syntacticians, phonologists, formal semanticists, sociolinguists interested in morphological variation, typologists, historical linguists studying morphological change, computational linguists working on morphology, child language researchers, psycholinguists and neurolinguists studying morphological processing.

To accommodate the wide range of different interests there would be an extensive introductory chapter, written by the editor of the volumes, laying out all the basic issues differentiating modern theories of morphology and showing how MaS is positioned with respect to these theories.

The first volume would include the aforementioned introduction, plus a series of 10 reprints of classical works, including Collins and Kayne 1993, papers feeding into it, and papers immediately resulting from it. The second volume would include a set of 10 of the best papers resulting from the Morphology as Syntax workshop series, or papers inspired by that workshop series. 

Each paper in the two volumes would consist of the application of MaS ideas to concrete empirical problems, showing why a syntactic approach to these problems is often more insightful and more empirically accurate than an analysis presupposing a rich morphological component.

References:

Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. Mouton, The Hague.

Collins, Chris and Richard Kayne. 2023. Towards a Theory of Morphology as Syntax. Studies in Chinese Linguistics 44, 1-32.

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, 111-176. MIT Press, Cambridge.