Morphology readings

I remember reading somewhere that until the 60's, the subjects that constituted morphology used to be divided up by phonology and syntax. Which, in a weird way, makes a weird sort of sense. Morphology lives on the boundary of the formal, almost mathematical study of structure and the philosophical study of meaning. It is the avant-garde, imaginative little sister of the more conservative subjects who embraces her own ambiguity, creating, examining, and dissecting it all at the same time.

But not in a vacuum. In Haspelmath's introductions to morphology, he almost exclusively explores the definition of what a "word" is. Or, specifically, what lexemes and word-forms are, along with how morphological atoms work within them, how those atoms work as roots and affixes, how atoms fit together in compounds, and many more structural problems reminiscent of syntax. However, while I'm sure there's still much unexplored territory, the main problem of morphology does not seem to just be figuring out how words are put together, but how morphemes work on words.

There's only so much that the formal grammars of syntax - which can work equally well to delineate mathematical expressions and programming languages, which quite obviously have much less of the semantic ambiguities of natural language - can do for this. As Atkins and Levin demonstrate, "shake" verbs have one problem in the form of different transitivities, which isn't too hard to represent in X-bar, but how do we predict the number of arguments? As they later develop, it's based on a slight difference in meaning - specifically, whether the "shaking" is internally caused or externally caused.

And this brings up another border that morphology dares to cross. At what point does this just become a study of semantics? Slobin provides plenty of examples for the difference between V-languages and S-languages, where V-languages tend to have a focus on manner of motion, while S-languages focus on path. It's quite obviously necessary to define the difference between manner and path, and while this may seem trivial for some languages that use verb particles or bound morphemes, the problem persists that each morpheme must itself be defined. And while pretty much every English speaker knows what "popped out" means, what is the definition of "out"? Or, from another viewpoint, where do we stop morphologizing that "out" is a particle (or satellite, or coverb, or whatever near-synonym of those that English linguists have assigned to "out" in this usage) that represents a manner of motion, and start semanticizing what "out" actually "means"?

Side note: Morphology just happens to be one of my weaker subjects. Morphology also is the first subject for which we got hit with four average-20-page readings. Good game, TA's, good game.