Exploring Divergent Views on Word Structure

Challenging the Concept of the Morpheme

Abstract

How the morphosyntactic meaning is expressed through inflected word forms is one of the central questions in linguistics and one which has been responsible for conflicting views of word structure. In this paper we discuss some of the ways in which this question has been approached by providing an overview and understanding of two competing perspectives in morphological thinking within the context of Generative Grammar. These perspectives, known as the morpheme-based model and the word-based model, will be discuss to show how they deal with the form-meaning correspondence. With this paper, I offer a critical analysis of the approaches, highlighting their implications for our understanding of word structure.