Distributed Morphology and vocabulary organisation

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the status and the organisation of the vocabulary in Distributed Morphology (DM) (Halle and Marantz 1993). Based on evidence drawn from the verbal forms in Modern Greek I claim that the vocabulary has an independent structure where word formation processes may occur, and it is the repository not only of syntactic and phonological but also morphological features. As far as the organisation of the vocabulary entries is concerned, I propose that they are organised in tree hierarchies based on the degree of markedness of theme vowels – and not blocks organised in terms of specificity as in the standard DM approach. Finally, this view of the vocabulary has important consequences for word formation and the treatment of allomorphy.