The autonomy of morphology

In this contribution we acknowledge that morphology interacts with, and is intimately related to, semantics, syntax, and phonology, but we maintain that it has an existence independent to these systems and is not conceptually irreducible to them. This fact underlies the claim of the autonomy of morphology: that morphology possesses its own laws, principles, and methodology which are not simply deducible from or reducible to those of other disciplines. We provide a brief overview of the origins of the concept of autonomous morphology, the main ways that it has been applied to the Romance languages, and how it is related to the concept of the morphome. We then provide a typological overview of the canonical cases of linguistic structures which support the autonomy of morphology and note the magnitude of evidence from the Romance languages. We conclude with some theoretical observations and reflections as to why purely morphological phenomena have so often been reduced to syntactic or phonological explanations. We suggest that the answer lies in ingrained assumptions about the basic units of mental storage, morphology being conceived as a concatenative constructive process and a theoretical reductionist tendency to relate phenomena to a single coherent system and organizing principle.