Department of French and Italian

Morphology is the study of word structure, and as such it occupies a central place in linguistics even though it is often overshadowed by its neighbors, phonology and syntax. In this course, which introduces morphology from the perspective of the structure of French, we will be concerned both with basic questions that must be answered in any theory (such as the elusive definitions of morpheme and word) and with the various approaches to morphology taken within Generative Linguistics. Among the questions particular to French that we will investigate are the structure of verb endings and the role of the paradigm (inflectional morphology); the building up of words from roots and affixes in derivation -- some learned (popul-aire), some native (peupl-ade), and some highly colloquial (flic+aille); the status of the feminine desinence (inflection & derivation); and the process of compounding (e.g. la porte-parole, le cessez-le-feu). Because issues in generative morphology interact so crucially with both syntactic and phonological theory, the course affords an opportunity for students to solidify their understanding of generative theory as a whole.