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State-of-the-Article: Distributed Morphology Heidi Harley and Rolf Noyer, University of Pennsylvania appeared in GLOT 4.4, April 1999, pp. 3-9 Whenever a major revision to the architecture of UG is proposed, it takes some time for sufficient work to accumulate to allow evaluation of the viability of the proposal, as well as for its broad outlines to become familiar to those not immediately involved in the investigation. The introduction of Distributed Morphology in the early 1990s, by Morris Halle and Alec Marantz, is a case in point. In the four-year period since the first paper outlining the framework appeared, a reasonably substantial body of work has appeared, addressing some of the key issues raised by the revision. The goal of this article is to introduce the motivation and core assumptions for the framework, and at the same time provide some pointers to the recent work which revises and refines the basic DM proposal and increases DM's empirical coverage. Since the particular issues we discuss cover such a broad range of territory, we do not attempt to provide complete summaries of individual papers, nor, for the most part, do we attempt to relate the discussion of particular issues to the much broader range of work that has been done in the general arena. What we hope to do is allow some insight into (and foster some discussion of) the attitude that DM takes on specific issues, with some illustrative empirical examples. This article is organized as follows. Section 1 sketches the layout of the grammar and discusses the division of labor between its components. The 'distributed' of Distributed Morphology refers to the separation of properties which in other theories are collected in the Lexicon, and in section 1 we elaborate on the motivation for this separation and its particulars. Section 2 explicates the mechanics of Spell-out, giving examples of competition among phonological forms from Dutch, introducing the notion of 'f-morpheme' and 'l-morpheme' and distinguishing allomorphy from suppletion with examples from English. Section 3 discusses the operations which are available in the Morphology component, addressing in turn Morphological Merger, Impoverishment and Fission, with examples from Latin, Serbo-Croatian, Norwegian, and Tamazight Berber. We also provide an illustration of the contrast between a 'piece-based' theory such as DM and process-based morphological theories. Section 4 treats the relationship of the syntax to the morphology, Separationism and its limitations, the ways in which a mismatch between syntactic terminal nodes and morphosyntactic features may arise, and the distinct types of syntax/morphology mismatches conventionally classified as cliticization. We conclude in Section 5 with an agenda for future research.

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