Morphology
Morphology can be thought of roughly as the study of the structure of the parts of words, including for instance the nature of affixes. At Penn, morphology research spans into the syntax-morphology interface, in particular with a distributed morphology perspective in which morphology is thought to have the same constituent structures as at the level of syntax.
Much of 's work likewise explores the
architecture of native-speaker grammars. He has done important work in
Distributed Morphology, a new theory of the architecture of morphosyntax
which is still developing rapidly. He also investigates the relation
between morphology and argument structure, especially the appearance of
related verbs (sometimes ostensibly "the same" verbs) in different
syntactic structures. In addition, his work explores the relation
between hierarchical syntactic structures and the strings which
instantiate them, including phonological aspects of the latter that are
relevant to syntax. Many of the questions addressed in this research
program are architectural in nature, concentrating on the question of
whether there are separate lexical and syntactic modes of derivation in
the grammar. The idea behind much of this work is to tie detailed
case-studies of phenomena from an individual language or languages to
broader questions concerning the architecture of grammars.
's work spans phonology and morphology.
His dissertation was one of the first full expositions of
Distributed Morphology, and he continues to work and publish in
this frontier area of the field.
is interested in the real-time
mechanisms of morphological processing and storage, and the
architectural issues of morphology in the grammar. Of specific concerns
is the issue of morphological productivity, which cuts deeply across the
domains of morphological learning, processing, and change.