The Structure of Words at the Interfaces

This volume takes a variety of approaches to the question 'what is a word?', with particular emphasis on where in the grammar wordhood is determined. Chapters in the book all start from the assumption that structures at, above, and below the 'word' are built in the same derivational system: there is no lexicalist grammatical subsystem dedicated to word-building. This type of framework foregrounds the difficulty in defining wordhood. Questions such as whether there are restrictions on the size of structures that distinguish words from phrases, or whether there are combinatory operations that are specific to one or the other, are central to the debate. In this respect, chapters in the volume do not all agree. Some propose wordhood to be limited to entities defined by syntactic heads, while others propose that phrasal structure can be found within words. Some propose that head-movement and adjunction (and Morphological Merger, as its mirror image) are the manner in which words are built, while others propose that phrasal movements are crucial to determining the order of morphemes word-internally. All chapters point to the conclusion that the phonological domains that we call words are read off of the morphosyntactic structure in particular ways. It is the study of this interface, between the syntactic and phonological modules of Universal Grammar, that underpins the discussion in this volume.

Heather Newell is Assistant Professor in the Linguistics department at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal. Her work is an investigation of how morphological phenomena inform theories of phonology, morphology, and their interface. She is the former book review editor and current co-editor of the Canadian Journal of Linguistics.


Maire Noonan is a course lecturer at McGill University and coordinator of the Montreal Word Structure project. She has worked on Celtic syntax, covering topics such as the lexical semantics and syntax of stative verbs, long distance A-bar constructions, and person-number marking. Her recent research investigates spatial adpositional constructions in Germanic and Romance from a cartographic perspective.

Glyne Piggott is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at McGill University. His research focuses on phonology, morphology, and the syntax-phonology interface, with special reference to Ojibwe (an Algonquian language). He is well known for his contributions to syllable structure, nasal harmony, and stress assignment. He has published in Linguistic Inquiry, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, The Linguistic Review, Phonology, Lingua and Canadian Journal of Linguistics.

Lisa Travis is Professor in the Department of Linguistics at McGill University where she has been teaching since 1984. Her research focuses mainly on phrase structure, head movement, language typology, Austronesian languages (in particular, Malagasy and Tagalog), and the interface between syntax and phonology. Recent publications include Inner Aspect: The Articulation of VP (Springer, 2010), and she is the co-editor, with Jessica Coon and Diane Massam, of The Oxford Handbook of Ergativity (OUP, 2017).