Configurational heads in inflectional morphology: the structure of the inflected forms in Basque

Abstract

This paper presents evidence for a configurational notion of head in inflectional morphology. Following Marantz (1984) and Baker (1985), it is assumed that inflectional morphology is distinct from derivational morphology and that it is generated in the mapping from D-structure to S-structure. It is then argued that there is no need for language particular and construction specific morphological rules; the shape of inflected forms is claimed to result from syntactic configuration and general properties of head adjunction.
   The empirical evidence on which the argumentation is based has been mainly drawn from inflected verbal forms in Basque, although the paper relies on the assumption that the conclusions presented hold cross linguistically in agglutinative and polysynthetic languages.