The Morphosyntax-Phonology Connection: Locality and Directionality at the Interface

The essays in this volume address a core question regarding the structure of linguistic systems: how much access do the grammatical components - syntax, morphology and phonology - have to each other? The book's fifteen essays make a powerful argument in favor of a particular view of the interaction of these various components, shedding light on the nature of locality domains for allomorph selection, the morphosyntactic properties of the targets of phonological exponence, and adjudicating between competing theories of morphosyntaxphonology interaction. These words incorporate insights from recent theoretical developments such as Optimality Theory and Distributed Morphology, and insights made available to us by contemporary empirical methodologies, including field work and experimental and corpus-based quantitative work.

Vera Gribanova is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University. Her research explores the principles that connect word and sentence structure to (morpho-)phonological structure, primarily in Russian, Bulgarian and Uzbek.

Stephanie S. Shih is an Assistant Professor in Cognitive & Information Sciences at University of California, Merced. Her research centers on understanding how sound patterns interface with the larger linguistic and cognitive system, as informed by quantitative, corpus-based approaches to the study of natural language.