Reconciling the Saussure brothers: Morph-based and paradigm-based views of word structure are mutually compatible

ABSTRACT: Reconciling the Saussure brothers: Morph-based and paradigm-based views of word structure are mutually compatible 

Martin Haspelmath

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig)

haspelmath@gmail.com

This talk argues for the mutual compatibility of two fundamental perspectives on word structure in linguistics: the morph-based view, favoured by René de Saussure, and the paradigm-based view, favoured by Ferdinand de Saussure (see Anderson 2018). While these perspectives have often been presented as opposing – characterized as "incremental" versus "realizational," and "piece-based" versus "process-based" – I suggest that they are not only compatible but complementary, especially when viewed from the perspective of general grammar.

The morph-based view, which treats words as concatenations of minimal forms (morphs), facilitates cross-linguistic comparison and typological generalization. In contrast, the paradigm-based approach, which analyzes word forms as realizations of abstract category values (e.g., person, number, tense), may be best for describing inflectional patterns within individual languages. The perceived incompatibility (e.g. Spencer 2004; Stump 2019; Luís 2023) exists only if the concepts for language-particular description and general comparison are conflated.

The talk starts out from the observation that morphs emerge from paradigmatic variation: without systematic patterns of form-meaning correspondences across word forms, the segmentation of complex words into morphs would not be possible. The paradigm-view is thus fundamental, but the realizational approach is not general enough: While inflectional features of lexemes are perhaps most elegantly described in a process-based way by realization rules, this cannot be extended to all of morphosyntax. Since there are no good reasons to assume a bifurcation of language systems into (word-oriented) morphology and (sentence-oriented) syntax (Haspelmath 2011; 2023), we need morphs and morph combinations anyway.

However, even though we need morphs (Haspelmath 2020) for general grammar, they should not be thought of as “lexical items”:  There are no good reasons to assume a bifurcation into “grammar” and “lexicon” as two distinct components (Jackendoff 2013; Haspelmath 2024), so forms and constructions are on a par as inventorial items. If we take a constructional view of morphology (e.g. Audring & Jackendoff 2025), the morph-based and the paradigm-based views are no longer incompatible, but merely two perspectives on the same phenomena.

Maybe René de Saussure’s universalism (exemplifed by his strong interest in Esperanto) led him to prefer the morph-based view, while Ferdinand’s strong interest in Sanskrit and the history of Indo-European languages led him to prefer the paradigm-based view?

References

Anderson, Stephen. 2018. The morphological theory of René de Saussure’s works. In Anderson, Stephen R. & de Saussure, Louis (eds.), Language Science Press, 209–227. Berlin: Language Science Press. (doi:10.5281/zenodo.1306472)

Audring, Jenny & Jackendoff, Ray S. 2025. Construction Morphology and Relational Morphology. In Fried, Mirjam & Nikiforidou, Kiki (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of Construction Grammar, 101–128. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Haspelmath, Martin. 2011. The indeterminacy of word segmentation and the nature of morphology and syntax. Folia Linguistica 45(1). 31–80. (doi:10.1515/flin-2017-1005)

Haspelmath, Martin. 2020. The morph as a minimal linguistic form. Morphology 30(2). 117–134. (doi:10.1007/s11525-020-09355-5)

Haspelmath, Martin. 2023. Defining the word. WORD 69(3). 283–297. (doi:10.1080/00437956.2023.2237272)

Haspelmath, Martin. 2024. Four kinds of lexical items: Words, lexemes, inventorial items, and mental items. Lexique: Revue en Sciences du Langage (34). 71–95. (doi:10.54563/lexique.1737)

Jackendoff, Ray. 2013. Constructions in the Parallel Architecture. In Hoffmann, Thomas & Trousdale, Graeme (eds.), The Oxford handbook of Construction Grammar, 70–92. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195396683.013.0005)

Luís, Ana R. 2023. Exploring divergent views on word structure: Challenging the concept of the morpheme. Biblos (9). 277–299. (doi:10.14195/0870-4112_3-9_13)

Spencer, Andrew. 2004. Morphology: An overview of central concepts. In Sadler, Louisa & Spencer, Andrew (eds.), Projecting morphology, 67–109. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information. (https://typo.uni-konstanz.de/csli-konstanz/books/projecting-morphology.pdf)

Stump, Gregory T. 2019. Theoretical issues in inflection. In Audring, Jenny & Masini, Francesca (eds.), The Oxford handbook of morphological theory, 56–82. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199668984.013.4)