This book proposes a theory of the syntax-morphology interface. A radically modular view of grammar is defended: the grammar contains separate ‘macromodules’ that deal with the wellformedness of syntactic, phonological, and semantic structures, respectively. The structures produced in the respective macromodules are not derivationally related. Rather there is a set of correspondence rules that regulate, for example, what parts of a syntactic structure can correspond to what parts of a phonological structure and vice versa. Within the ‘macromodules’, there are separate submodules that deal with ... More

This book proposes a theory of the syntax-morphology interface. A radically modular view of grammar is defended: the grammar contains separate ‘macromodules’ that deal with the wellformedness of syntactic, phonological, and semantic structures, respectively. The structures produced in the respective macromodules are not derivationally related. Rather there is a set of correspondence rules that regulate, for example, what parts of a syntactic structure can correspond to what parts of a phonological structure and vice versa. Within the ‘macromodules’, there are separate submodules that deal with sub-word structure and supra-word structure. Thus, the syntactic macromodule contains a submodule that deals with the wellformedness of complex words and a submodule that deals with the wellformedness of sentences. Similarly, the phonological macromodule contains a submodule that deals with lexical phonology and a submodule that deals with sentence-level prosodic phonology. The submodules dealing with sub-word structure jointly comprise what is usually referred to as ‘morphology’. The book discusses in detail (i) the ways in which the sentence-level and word-level submodules within the larger syntax macromodule interact; and (ii) phenomena that follow from interaction of the syntactic macromodule with the phonological macromodule.