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by Chet Creider
and Richard Hudson
last updated 30 March 2004
Published in Lingua 107, 163-187, 1999.
The treatment of morphology in Word Grammar has received less attention than syntax and semantics, but the general principles are equally applicable to morphology. We outline a theory of inflectional morphology which uses ideas familiar from the Word-and-Paradigm tradition - Inflection, Lexeme and Stem - in combination with the logic of default inheritance. We apply this theory to a range of different morphological data: agglutinative (Swahili) and fusional, with and without syncretism (English, Welsh). We show that it is possible to analyse each of these types in a natural way without forcing it into an unsuitable mould, and in a discussion of Cree we show how dialect variation can be accommodated. We compare the WG theory with other approaches which are currently popular, especially a-morphous morphology, distributed morphology and network morphology. Key words: morphology, default inheritance, inflection