Morpho-x-syntax

[vegfarandi]

There's a space between morphology and syntax, that is the semantics(?) of each morpheme and the resulting morph. These chapters are usually titled something like The Use of the Noun, The Use of the Verb, and are traditionally considered to be part of syntax. But it's typically necessary to at least give an overview of this information as you discuss the associated morphology.

In some languages, these chapters on "usage" (a word I find somewhat lackluster in this context) comprise a sizable chunk of the overall syntax discussion. In some ways, this is the syntax of the word, as opposed to the syntax of a phrase, clause or sentence. My question is, are there any words that have been proposed for this aspect of grammatical description?

The reason I ask, is because I'm finding it really difficult to fit this particular information in my Imutan grammar – unusually so compared to previous grammars – due to how complex this particular aspect of Imutan is, so I want to give it the space it requires. Love to hear your thoughts.

[vegfarandi]

To further illustrate my point, below is the beginning of the "syntax of the word" as it relates to TAM marking.

Ignoring the irrealis perfect for a moment, consider the affirmative triad of imperfect, perfect, and irrealis:

kig, kanig, kigê

Often, these are used in opposing ways to indicate an incomplete action, a complete action, and one that is neither, merely contemplated or expected in the future:

imperfect: gumjit-es otos ‘I’m coming home’
perfect: gumjanit-es otos ‘I’ve come home’, ‘I’ve arrived at home’, ‘I’ve gotten home’
irrealis: gumjitê-es otos ‘I will come home’

These can simply be negated, filling in most of the remaining TAPM category matrix:

gumjibut-es otos, gujanibut-es otos, gumjitê bu ȝes otos
I’m not coming home, I haven’t gotten home, I won’t come home

In addition to this contemplative use, the finite irrealis has a variety of other uses—most prominently forming questions:

gumjitê-es otos? ‘do I come home?’

Questions is the primary context where the irrealis perfect might be found in a finite clause:

gumjipe-es otos? ‘have I arrived at home?’

However, increasingly, such questions are reworded as gumjitê bu ȝes otos?
In finite clauses these forms tend to have tense implications as opposed to aspect implications, but in subclauses, they are entirely aspectual:

dan-tuo kpassei-kja ‘he said that she was eating’ (eating is simultaneous)
dan-tuo kamassei-kja ‘he said that she had eaten’ (eating is complete)
dan-tuo kuȝasgo-kja ‘he said that she would eat’ (eating has not happened)

[Frislander]

Well, this is kind of what the term "morphosyntax" is on about. In an entirely morphosyntactic grammar, you might choose, rather than have a specific section devoted to "syntax" in its entirety, you might instead have chapters discussing "nominal morphosyntax", where each form is discussed along with its function, either incrementally, or with a section at the end of the chapter discussing the function of the sum total of forms discussed in the preceding chapter.

It may also be relevant to consider the relative balancing of the book. For example, in a highly-morphologically complex language you might want to spend a lot of space discussing simply the forms, and leave discussion of the actual function to the syntax section, particularly when the exponence of a given form is complex (for example if there are several different regular means of forming the plural for instance), or if most of the categories of the language are marked by morphology and pure clause-level syntax takes a back seat. On the flipside, if the morphology is relatively simple then you might want to discuss function alongside form simply to avoid the discussion of a given form consisting of an entire sentence along the lines of "Category X is marked by form Y" and a couple of examples.

In neither case would I consider it worth discussing these things separately from both morphology and syntax.

[zompist]

Ooh, do I see bu 'not' wandering in from Mandarin or Cadhinor?

Verbs get complex... if they're not complex you're probably messing up... and if you have strong aspectual and modal systems they probably require a lot of explanation and examples. So my approach would be to lay out the paradigms in a Morphology section, and explain everything else somewhere in Syntax. But a lot of that is a personal preference for a shortish Morphology section so I can look up forms quickly.

To put it another way, I don't think there's a need for some new branch of linguistics. It's all morphosyntax, eh? But many languages have more of a "verb complex" than just verbs: e.g. English, French, Hindi. I'd just bite the bullet and have a section that explains the whole verbal complex. And maybe a smaller section that explains just the simplest bits, so the poor reader can start somewhere.

[Salmoneus]

One thing to consider if someone goes down the route of a relatively 'rich' morphology section is having a separate 'morphological index' at the back listing forms (or tables, if there are too many forms for a linear list) and names for forms and directing the reader back to the relevant place in the morphology section. That allows people to look up a form directly without having to wade through morphosyntactic explanations if they don't want to.

[vegfarandi]

Ooh, do I see bu 'not' wandering in from Mandarin or Cadhinor?

Verbs get complex... if they're not complex you're probably messing up... and if you have strong aspectual and modal systems they probably require a lot of explanation and examples. So my approach would be to lay out the paradigms in a Morphology section, and explain everything else somewhere in Syntax. But a lot of that is a personal preference for a shortish Morphology section so I can look up forms quickly.

To put it another way, I don't think there's a need for some new branch of linguistics. It's all morphosyntax, eh? But many languages have more of a "verb complex" than just verbs: e.g. English, French, Hindi. I'd just bite the bullet and have a section that explains the whole verbal complex. And maybe a smaller section that explains just the simplest bits, so the poor reader can start somewhere.

Yeah, makes sense.

One thing to consider if someone goes down the route of a relatively 'rich' morphology section is having a separate 'morphological index' at the back listing forms (or tables, if there are too many forms for a linear list) and names for forms and directing the reader back to the relevant place in the morphology section. That allows people to look up a form directly without having to wade through morphosyntactic explanations if they don't want to.

You're saying as an appendix? Yeah, I might want to do that because Imutan's morphology is largely based on binary-feature morphemes (with only a handful of fusional ones) and each is applied independently of one another, so in effect there's a really huge number of "paradigms" as the combinations of morphemes are each being affected by environment in different ways. So that makes sense too.