This book develops a theory of the morpheme in the framework of Distributed Morphology. Particular emphasis is devoted to the way in which functional morphemes receive their phonological form post-syntactically, through the operation of Vocabulary Insertion. In addition to looking closely at syncretism, the primary motivation for Vocabulary Insertion, the book examines allomorphy, blocking, and other key topics in the theory of the morpheme.

Morphology - The Descriptive Analysis of Words

The present volume is a complete revision of a work of the same title published in I946 in the University of Michigan Publications in Linguistics. But instead of setting up morphological and phonological processes as basic to the descriptive methodology, it treats the morpheme together with its allomorphs as the fundamental feature.