THE MORPHEME

This book develops a theory of the morpheme in the framework of Distributed Morphology. Particular emphasis is devoted to the way in which functional morphemes receive their phonological form post-syntactically, through the operation of Vocabulary Insertion. In ad dition to looking closely at syncretism, the primary motivation for Vocabulary Insertion, the book examines allomorphy, blocking, an d other key topics in the theory of the morpheme.