Thinking about language structures is made difficult not only by their incredible complexity, but also by entrenched ways of thinking about grammatical and lexical patterns. Linguists do not investigate languages in fresh way, but against the background (and often on the basis) of a centuries-old tradition.
Could it be that these traditional and stereotypical ways of thinking sometimes get in the way of approaching our objects of study in a fair way? Few linguists would deny this possibility, so here I will list four ways in which this may have adversely affected morphosyntactic descriptions and general theories:
– the word stereotype (1)
– the grammar/dictionary stereotype (2)
– the building-block stereotype (3)
– the speaker directionality stereotype (4)
(1) The word stereotype
The best-known problematic notion is the “word”, which is very salient in dictionaries (“the lexeme”) and in texts written in orthographies with word division. Linguists have often taken a “word” notion for granted, both in phonology (e.g. when they talk about word prosody, especially word stress) and in morphosyntax. The “word” notion is foundational for the distinction between morphology and syntax, because morphology is defined as “the part of linguistics that studies the grammatical properties of words” (Fábregas & Scalise 2025: 1). However, these same authors acknowledge that “the definition of word is elusive” (2025: 29), but they still want to separate morphology and syntax:
“The main idea is that if morphology and syntax contain distinct sets of rules and create distinct objects, the rules of syntax cannot manipulate the units built by morphology simply because they belong to two different domains of grammar.” (Fábregas & Scalise 2025: 32)
How these two different “domains of grammar” could be identified if the definition of “word” is elusive remains unclear. But many linguists still take the “word” notion for granted, and despite the general awareness of the problems with wordhood (Haspelmath 2011), many continue to simply assume that morphology is distinct from syntax.
For example, many morphologists assume (or claim) that morphological patterns must be captured by “realization rules“, rather than by syntagmatic combination of forms (see, e.g., Stump 2001; Anderson 2017; on “inferential theories” which use transformational rules rather than “lexical morphemes”). However, this can only work for “words”, so the approach only works if morphology is a separate domain that works differently from syntax. But is this more than a stereotype, or a preconception that happens to be widerspread at morphology conferences?
(2) The grammar/dictionary stereotype
Book-length descriptions of languages usually come in two types: grammar books and dictionaries. It appears that this has a strong influence on our stereotypical thinking about the way language systems work – we are prone to thinking that our systems consist of sets of abstract rules (morphosyntax) and sets of concrete items (lexicon) which are inserted into the rule slots.
That this is implausible has been noted at least since the 1980s, and it is now widely recognized that (“lexical”) words and (“morphosyntactic”) constructions are in many ways similar: “all types of linguistic knowledge can be seen as being of the same type, as being cut from the same cloth.” (Hilpert 2021: 5) All three are listed in the “constructicon”:
“Concrete, partially schematic, and fully schematic constructions together form a hierarchical network known as the ‘extended lexicon’ or ‘constructicon’.” (Audring & Jackendoff 2025: 101)
I have given reasons for preferring the term inventorium (see Haspelmath 2024a), but the main point is that words are not located in “a different place” (e.g. a different component, or module) of the language system than constructions. This also means that “word-formation” is not different from “sentence-formation”: When we form a word, this does not mean that it automatically gets stored somewhere, just as sentences do not get stored automatically. Storage (or inventorization) is quite different from formation, but words and sentences are not different in nature – so it does not make sense to distinguish “potential words” from “actual words”, anymore than it makes sense to distinguish “potential sentences” from “actual sentences” (Haspelmath 2025a).
The grammar/dictionary stereotype also seems to be responsible for the widespread idea that inflectional patterns must be different from derivational patterns. As I noted in Haspelmath (2024b), inflectional patterns are traditionally described in rather different ways than derivational patterns (e.g. using special expressions such as “the noun is in the dative”, or “the verb is in the subjunctive”), even though there is no deep difference between them. The widespread stereotype is that inflected forms are “forms of the same word”, whereas derived forms are “new lexemes”, but if the derivational rules are productive, inflectional and derivational forms behave in exactly the same way. The very notion of “lexeme” seems motivated primarily by the grammar/dictionary tradition, not by anything in the systems of our languages.
(3) The building-block stereotype
Languages allow speakers to form complex expressions of indefinite length, which is possible only by combing smaller forms. This has naturally led to the stereotype that grammatical rules have the function of “putting together” (= Greek syn-tassein, a verb that yielded syntax) basic building blocks. These building blocks are often words (as in dependency grammar, e.g. de Marneffe et al. 2021), but they can also be morphemes. Morphologists have often argued against the generality of the morpheme notion (e.g. Anderson 2015), but that grammatical structures consist of discrete building blocks that are concatenated is still a very powerful stereotype.
Perhaps the most salient example of this is the recurrent claim that zero can be a building block, alongside other building blocks. For example, Harley (2006: 148-149) lists several competing “vocabulary items” for the English nounplural, among them “-Ø”:
Many linguists have objected to the treatment of “zero” as a building block, but the building-block stereotype seems to be so strong that the idea keeps resurfacing. And even though the widespread occurrence of nonconcatenative patterns has long been discussed extensively, there are still linguists who want to reduce all such patterns to concatenative patterns (e.g. Bye & Svenonius 2012)
(4) The speaker orientation stereotype
Finally, linguists have a strong tendency to think about grammatical patterns from the perspective of speakers, rather than addressees. This is particular salient when linguists talk about transformations or operations of various kinds (“movement”, “deletion”, etc). The rule systems discussed by linguists always start out with a basic form from which another form is derived, in such a way that a surface form results which can be produced by the speaker.
While transformational approaches have often been criticized in syntax (e.g. Hudson 1977; Borsley & Börjars (eds) 2011), several mainstream syntax approaches still make use of them. And in morphological circles, “realizational approaches” crucially make reference to speaker-oriented operations (“production”), as noted recently by Carroll & Beniamine (2025: 232):
“[in realizational approaches in morphology,] inflectional forms are introduced in order to express the inflectional meanings associated with the words. This formulation thus also implies the metaphor of production: meaning comes prior and triggers the presence of inflectional form.”
But of course, comprehension is just as important as production, so ideally, our descriptions should be directionality-neutral.
Morphologists even sometimes impose directionality where the phenomena do not show any clear asymmetry. For example, in “conversion” pairs (e.g. to dance/the dance, to hammer/the hammer), morphologists often ask which way the “derivation” goes, even though there is no signal of “derivation”. If one adopts a perspective that is genuinely neutral between speaker and addressee, there is no reason to assume any kind of “process” here (see also Haspelmath 2025b on directionality conversion).
Similarly, when two forms are related in an endophonic pattern, e.g. German fliegen/Flug (‘fly/flight’), schieben/Schub (‘to push/the push’), ziehen/Zug (‘pull/train’), there is often no clear reason to give priority to one of the forms, and to assume any kind of directionality. Stereotypically, such cases are often described as “stem change”, but “change” implies a directionality, and a basic form from which the other form is obtained via an operation (or transformation). If we want to avoid the speaker orientation stereotype, we should probably also avoid directionality-based descriptions.
As far as I can see, the one conceptual framework that comes closest to avoiding all four stereotypes is Audring’s and Jackendoff’s Relational Morphology (Jackendoff & Audring 2020a, 2020b, Audring & Jackendoff 2025), and more generally, Jackendoff’s “parallel architecture” (e.g. Jackendoff 2013).
In this approach, (i) word structures and sentence structures are very similar (as in other constructional approaches); (ii) there is awareness that there is no dichotomy of “grammar vs. dictionary” (cf. Jackendoff’s notion of “extended lexicon”, Jackendoff 1995); (iii) the approach is constructional and thus accommodates both forms (“building blocks”) and holistic patterns (such as zero-marked constructions) in an analogous way, without creating artificial building blocks; and (iv) the approach does not require transformations or operations and thus is not biased toward the speaker’s productions.
Jackendoff and many others see their approaches as claims about human cognitive organization, and I often find them plausible, but linguists generally do not have good reasons of their own to opt for one or the other hypothesis of how human cognition is organized. (In fact, it could be that different speakers of the same language have organized their linguistic knowledge differently, using different mental resources, but giving the same outputs.) Thus, I would not endorse Jackendoff’s entire programme, but I do think that linguists should be aware of traditional stereotypes for which there is typically no good justification.
There are probably many situations where it does not matter much how one talks about grammar, and where no harm is done if one uses a “word” notion or a “building block” notion without good justification. We get a problem only when bigger claims are made which rely on stereotypical ideas that are not well-founded.
References
Anderson, Stephen R. 2015. The morpheme: Its nature and use. In Baerman, Matthew (ed.), The Oxford handbook of inflection, 11–33. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Anderson, Stephen R. 2017. Words and paradigms: Peter H. Matthews and the development of morphological theory. Transactions of the Philological Society 115(1). 1–13. (doi:10.1111/1467-968X.12090)
Borsley, Robert & Börjars, Kersti (eds.). 2011. Non-transformational syntax: Formal and explicit models of grammar. John Wiley & Sons.
Bye, Patrik & Svenonius, Peter. 2012. Non-concatenative morphology as epiphenomenon. In Trommer, Jochen (ed.), The morphology and phonology of exponence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Carroll, Mae & Beniamine, Sacha. 2025. Exponence and the theory of discriminative information in paradigms. Morphology 35(2). 227–269. (doi:10.1007/s11525-025-09437-2)
de Marneffe, Marie-Catherine & Manning, Christopher D. & Nivre, Joakim & Zeman, Daniel. 2021. Universal Dependencies. Computational Linguistics 47(2). 255–308. (doi:10.1162/coli_a_00402)
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Haspelmath, Martin. 2024a. 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)
Haspelmath, Martin. 2024b. Inflection and derivation as traditional comparative concepts. Linguistics 62(1). 43–77. (doi:10.1515/ling-2022-0086)
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Haspelmath, Martin. 2025b. Roots and root classes in comparative grammar. In Levkovych, Nataliya & Nintemann, Julia & Vorholt, Maike (eds.), Exploring structures in languages and language contact, 307–324. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. (https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111496436-012/html)
Hilpert, Martin. 2021. Ten lectures on Diachronic Construction Grammar. Leiden: Brill.
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Jackendoff, Ray & Audring, Jenny. 2020b. The texture of the lexicon: Relational Morphology and the Parallel Architecture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jackendoff, Ray S. 1995. The boundaries of the lexicon. In Everaert, Martin & van der Linden, Erik-Jan & Schenk, André & Schreuder, Rob (eds.), Idioms: Structural and psychological perspectives, 133–165. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis.
Stump, Gregory T. 2001. Inflectional morphology: A theory of paradigm structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Martin Haspelmath (May 22, 2026). Four stereotypes that have guided morphosyntactic thinking. Diversity Linguistics Comment. Retrieved June 10, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/169l6