Heidi Harley
In Interfaces in Linguistics, ed. by Raffaella Folli and Christiane Ullbricht, 166-186. Oxford: OUP
Publication year: 2011

In a syntacticocentric approach to morphology, we expect to see morpheme orders which mirror syntactic structure. Three mechanisms are commonly proposed to change the order of syntactic terminal elements at the morphology/syntax interface, including head-movement, morpheme-specific prefix/suffix specification and morphological merger. Given that each mechanism is independently well-motivated, we can ask what kind of patterns we might expect to see when they co-occur. I argue that two particularly flagrant cases of Mirror Principle violations, in Cupeño and Navajo, can be accomodated within the syntacticocenric framework using just these tools, without positing any additional special word-formation mechanisms, or any additional quasi-syntactic operations.