Is morphology before or after syntax?. Evidence for deciding

Abstract

Whether syntax feeds morphology or not remains a topic of lively debate in contemporary linguistics. This current study adopts the LFG framework to compare the approaches represented by two opposing views, which we use to analyze double object constructions in Misantla Totonac, in which two object functions can control agreement simultaneously by means of inflectional markers. We first incorporate realization models of morphology into the interface, in which m-features in the morphological component are mapped onto the syntactic information in f-structures. We find that the replication of structured information in our analysis is shown to be completely redundant. However, we achieve formal simplification when morphological realization rules are defined directly by f-structures to generate inflected word forms. The morphologically complex language argues for the view that word formation is dependent on syntactic information.