Conclusion
At a minimum, the discussion above ought to have the effect of convincing the reader that the facts of natural language morphologies are as predicted by a theory of disjunctive organization based on principles (3) and (4) proposed in the introduction. In some cases, such a theory allows us to bring much more coherence to our account of the facts than seems possible on a more traditional, morpheme-based account, as with the analysis of Georgian -t in section 1. In others, superficial counterexamples to the theory, such as those examined in section 2, turn out on closer examination to be consistent with it after all, as shown in section 3. More important than the demonstration that particular examples can be given analyses (often ones that are superior to those otherwise available) within this theory, however, is another consideration. In each case above, the theory of disjunctive ordering itself suggested problems and lines of research that might not otherwise have been apparent, and which proved interesting and useful to investigate. It is thus not only a candidate for part of the theory of morphological structure, but also a productive research strategy for the investigation of such systems. Based as it is on the construal of morphology as a system of interacting rules expressing relations between forms, rather than as an inventory of unitary and meaningful ‘morphemes’, it supports the general utility of this larger view.
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This work was supported in part by grant number BNS-84-18277 from the National Science Foundation to the University of California, Los Angeles. The material here has been presented to various audiences at various times, including the 1983 Mid-America Linguistics Conference (see Anderson 1984a for an earlier version of the analysis in section 1 below), the Conference on the Phonology of Morphology at the University of Texas, Austin, in April, 1984, and colloquia at UCLA, Stanford University Center for the Study of Language and Information, USC, and SUNY-Buffalo. I am grateful to those who provided comments and suggestions on these occasions. Three anonymous referees for this journal also contributed to improving the final form of the paper.
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Anderson, S.R. Disjunctive ordering in inflectional morphology. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 4, 1–31 (1986). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00136262
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00136262