The relationship between morphology and syntax

 

As it is widely known, the interest in linguistics has increased in the last thirty years, in a changing field, with new approaches coming into stage and providing researchers with resources which make it possible to get more accurate analyses about grammatical information of words and how they relate to others.

 

As the main Spanish grammars (Piera and Varela, 1999; NGRAE, 2009) remark, from the end of the nineties there have been a lot of authors that, in an empirical approach, have brought the relationship morphology-syntax to light in such different aspects as: a) the distinction amongst word classes or grammar categories, processes in which both formal and functional criteria take part; b) the relationship between inflected forms and syntactic processes of government and agreement; c) the inner syntax of complex forms (or structure of the morphemes of a word) and their external syntax (or the syntactic projection of the word according to its morphological features).

 

In contrast, from a theoretical approach, the interface between morphology and syntax has focused on whether there is a real division between these two components of grammar. This question leads research towards the study of the nature of morphological knowledge and how it is organised. Answers have lead to two different standpoints: the lexicist framework, which sees morphology as an autonomous component, and the neoconstruccionist one, which holds that morphologhy is, actually, syntax (Fábregas, 2013: 31).

 

Within this framework of scientific discussion and progress of linguistic studies, the purpose of this workshop is to delve into the investigation of the properties of words, with particular attention to the relationship between morphology and syntax. We aim at getting more detailed explanations for a wide range of phenomena (deadjectival complex nouns, complex verbs, verbal phrases, locative prefixes, prepositions, thematic vowels, verbal inflection, etc.), always bearing in mind the different possibilities that each theoretical approach provides.