In generative linguistics

Generative linguistics

Generative linguistics is a school of thought within linguistics that makes use of the concept of a generative grammar. The term "generative grammar" is used in different ways by different people, and the term "generative linguistics" therefore has a range of different, though overlapping,...

, Distributed Morphology is a framework for theories of morphology

Morphology (linguistics)

In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...

 introduced in 1993 by Morris Halle

Morris Halle

Morris Halle , is a Latvian-American Jewish linguist and an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...

 and Alec Marantz

Alec Marantz

Alec Marantz is an American linguist and researcher in the fields of neurolinguistics and morphology.Until 2007, he was Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Research Director of KIT/MIT MEG Joint Research Lab...

. The central claim of Distributed Morphology is that there is no unified Lexicon

Lexicon

In linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. A lexicon is also a synonym of the word thesaurus. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes. Coined in English 1603, the word "lexicon" derives from the Greek "λεξικόν" , neut...

 as in earlier generative treatments of word-formation. Rather, the functions that other theories ascribe to the Lexicon are distributed among other components of the grammar.

In Distributed Morphology, the abstract morphemes that comprise words are held to be completely empty of phonological information until after the syntactic component

Syntax

In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....

 has finished manipulating them. That is, the structure of the sentence is worked out before there are any actual words present. The pieces of words that best match the syntactic structure are then inserted into the sentence.

Core properties

There are three main properties which distinguish Distributed Morphology from other theories:

Late Insertion : Phonological information is inserted into syntactic structure only after all syntactic operations have applied.
Underspecification

Underspecification

In theoretical linguistics, underspecification is a phenomenon in which certain features are omitted in underlying representations. Restricted underspecification theory holds that features should only be underspecified if their values are predictable. For example, in English, all front vowels are...

 of Vocabulary items: The phonological string inserted in a given syntactic position does not necessarily have to be specified for all of the morphosyntactic features of that position.
Syntactic Hierarchical Structure All the Way Down : The relationships among elements within words are structurally identical to those relationships that hold among words.

Vocabulary items

Distributed Morphology makes a distinction between the notion of a morpheme, which refers to a syntactic terminal element, and that of a Vocabulary item, which is defined as a relation between a string of phonological information and the context in which this string may be inserted. The standard schema for the representation of a Vocabulary item is as follows:

• signal ↔ context of insertion

An example Vocabulary item, from English:

• /-d/ ↔ [+past]

The functional vs. lexical distinction

The division between closed

Closed class

In linguistics, a closed class is a word class to which no new items can normally be added, and that usually contains a relatively small number of items. Typical closed classes found in many languages are adpositions , determiners, conjunctions, and pronouns.Contrastingly, an open class offers...

 and open

Open class (linguistics)

In linguistics, a word class may be either an open class or a closed class. Open classes accept the addition of new morphemes , through such processes as compounding, derivation, inflection, coining, and borrowing; closed classes generally do not....

 word classes is recast in Distributed Morphology as the distinction between f-morphemes (traditional closed classes) and l-morphemes (traditional open classes), which are defined as follows:

f-morpheme : A Vocabulary item whose context of insertion is sufficient to determine its phonological form.
l-morpheme : A Vocabulary item whose phonological form cannot be determined solely by its context of insertion. This includes the traditional classes of noun

Noun

In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...

s, adjective

Adjective

In grammar, an adjective is a 'describing' word; the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified....

s, and verb

Verb

A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...

s.

Competition

For example, to create the sentence, The dogs ate the meat, the word dogs is inserted after a noun root with the meaning [DOG] combines with a feature [plural]. At the end of the derivation, the English word dogs is inserted in the appropriate spot - that is, where the syntax decides to place the subject. Also, a verbal root meaning [EAT] combines with a [past tense] feature and [3rd person plural] feature. The closest matching word in English is ate, which is inserted wherever the syntax has determined that the verb should go. We should note that the [3rd person plural] feature is not actually matched in English, because there is a total lack of person/number agreement in the past tense in English:

I ate	we ate
you ate	you ate
s/he ate	they ate

Of course, many other languages do have active person/number agreement that must be matched. Consider the same verb conjugated in the past tense in Portuguese

Portuguese language

Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...

:

eu comi	nós comemos
tu comeste	vós comestes
ele/ela comeu	eles/elas comeram

Thus, the same sentence in Portuguese would enter the verb comeram, since it is the best match for the combination [EAT] [past tense] [3rd person plural]. The words cannot be entered until the features are combined in the right way.