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- Morphology
- is the set of all generalisations about words.
In this sense, morphology involves the modelling of the following properties (from a structural, synchronic point of view):
- Morphotactics:
- The immediate dominance (ID) relations between words and their parts, at the level of abstract lexical signs.
The ID hierarchy contains the following levels: morphophonemes-morphemes-derivations-compounds-idioms, which may be cyclically related by demotion relations, as in that certain I-wish-I-weren't-here-feeling .
- Morphosemantics:
- Compositional semantic interpretation throughout the hierarchy, with partial or complete opacity (with or without semantic decomposition of smallest parts; this is a separate issue).
It covers the same domain as lexical semantics, but with a methodological emphasis on composition rather than decomposition.
- Morphoprosody:
- Compositional segmental and suprasegmental morphoprosodic interpretation in parallel to compositional semantic interpretation.
Extreme case: fully or partially ``iconic'' meanings, as in it went ``oink'', where semantic and phonetic interpretations are linked.
- Morphographemics:
- Compositional orthographic interpretation, with linking forms (including hyphens) treated analogously to semantic relations in compounds.
Paradoxes' involve non-coextensive bracketings at these levels of lexical analysis.

Dafydd Gibbon
Sat Jan 6 20:59:29 MET 1996