5. Morphology and Syntax as two main parts of grammar

When it comes to the division of grammar into its two main spheres: morphology and syntax, linguists take their stance towards this problem according to the linguistic trend they support. Major debatable issues within this problem are (1) whether to recognize the distinction between morphology and syntax, (2) if the distinction is recognized, where the boundary between them should be drawn and what might fall under the scope of either.

First of all, linguists may recognize this division as well as discard it. For instance, the traditional differentiation between morphology and syntax was strongly doubted by such renowned linguists as F. de Saussure, L. Hjelmslev, Z. Harris, Ch. Hockett. In the American structuralist tradition interest lay more on the morpheme as the basic unit in syntax than on its role within the word. Z. Harris (1946) recognized, e.g., only “morphemes and sequences of morphemes” and eschewed the word as a unit of description. This statement is indicative of the position of American structuralists who discarded the division into morphology and syntax as unnecessary. The initial point of study was the syntagmatic combination of linguistic units, directly observable, and not their paradigmatic, systemic properties.

In transformational grammar, concentrated on syntactic structures the distinction between morphology and syntax cannot appear at all, per definitionem. Instead of these terms James Muir in his book “A Modern Approach to English grammar. An Introduction to Systemic Grammar” (London, 1972) introduces the notions of Surface Grammar and Deep Grammar which cover the directly observable facts lying on the surface and associative, deep relations not obvious at first sight. But these notions are not fully compatible to morphology and syntax.

The first grammarian who is said to have introduced the distinction between morphology and syntax and used these terms is O. Jespersen. It is worth noting though that in traditional grammars morphology was studied under a different label. The term used was accidence (from Latin accidentia ‘things which befall’) defined in J.C. Nesfield’s grammar (1898) as “the collective name for all those changes that are incidental to certain parts of speech”. Thus, accidence had to do with number, gender, case of nouns, voice, mood, number person, and tense of verbs, as well as their classification into regular and irregular types [Crystal 1995: 197]. Interestingly, H. Sweet also describes the distinction between accidence and syntax.

In case the existence of the two main spheres of grammar is accepted, the problem arises ‘what functions of English morphological and syntactic units, located within the limit of a sentence, come within the province of morphology or syntax” [Хлебникова 2001: 16].

Most linguists agree that morphology is the study of the meaningful parts of words, but there have broadly been two ways of looking at the overall role played by these meaningful parts of words in language. One way has been to play down the status of the word itself and look at the role of its parts in the overall syntax, the other has been to focus on the word as a central unit.

For O. Jespersen and other representatives of English classical grammar morphology is limited to word-building. All morphological grammatical categories, according to O. Jespersen, lie within syntax. G. Curme introduces such notions as “syntax of the noun, verb, etc.” which leads to the confusion of morphological and syntactical phenomena. Case for him can be expressed either by a preposition and a noun (e.g.: of the boy, to the boy) or by the position in a sentence (e.g.: I saw the boy, where the boy is used in the Accusative case). But both positions in a sentence and a word-combination are syntactic notions. H. Sweet holds that “the business of syntax is <…> to explain the meaning and function of grammatical forms, especially the various ways in which words are joined together to make sentences” (H. Sweet cited from [Блох 2004: 13]). All this makes the detection of the Morphology-Syntax boundary quite complicated.

Though the terms have been used by linguists for over a century, opinions have varied as to the precise definitions of the subject-area and scope of the notions under analysis. Interest in classifying language families across the world in the XIX^th century led to the study of how languages were differently structured both in broad and narrow ways, from the general laws of structure to the study of significant elements such as prefixes and inflections. In the XX^th century the field has narrowed to the study of the internal structure of words, but definitions still vary in detail.

The usual definition of morphology runs as follows: morphology is that part of grammar which treats of the forms of words. Thus, morphology is about the structure of words [Crystal 1995: 197; Handbook of Linguistics 2004: 213]. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics defines morphology as the study of the grammatical structure of words and the categories realized by them [Matthews 1997: 233].

Obviously, morphology studies units of a smaller and a more compact kind, whereas syntax deals with larger units, whose types and varieties are hard to number and exhaust. As for the usual definition of syntax, it may be said to be this: syntax being that part of grammar which treats of phrases and sentences [Ильиш 1971: 12] is the study of the principles governing how words can be assembled into sentences [Huddleston & Pullum 2006: 6].

The definitions of morphology and syntax are based on the assumption that we can clearly distinguish between words and phrases. This, however, is far from being the case. Usually, the distinction, indeed, is patent due to the feature of indestructibility. On the other hand, language facts can admit controversial interpretations. For instance, has been found is evidently a phrase since it consists of three words and thus it would seem to fall under syntax. But it is also a form of the verb find and thus it would seem to fall under morphology. It is obvious that we have a lot of overlapping and these formations should be considered both under morphology and syntax [Ильиш 1971: 12].

Hence the Morphology-Syntax division is not universal due to the fact that languages can belong to different families. This division is especially important for those languages which show a distinct difference between a word and a morpheme, for the so-called synthetic languages. But for analytical languages this division loses its absolute value to a great degree. English is a classical analytic language in which morphology is scarcely represented.

As, on the whole, morphology is the description of “morphemes and their patterns of occurrence within the word” (Allerton), the scope of morphology, according to various linguistic conceptions, may include

• the description of inflexions of the words of the language;

• the description of morphological categories characterizing this or that language;

• morphological processes;

• word-building.