Explaining derivational morphology as the convergence of codes

Language users have a remarkable ability to create, produce and comprehend complex words. Words such as undercut and bakery appear to be composed of units, traditionally called morphemes, that recombine in rule-like ways to form other words, such as underline and cannery. However, morphological systems are quasiregular: they are systematic and productive but admit many seemingly irregular forms. Thus, bakery is related to bake and cannery to can but what is the groce in grocery? There is no bread in sweetbreads, liver in deliver, corn in corner or ginger in gingerly. Such words exhibit partial regularities concerning the correspondences between form and meaning, the treatment of which has important implications for linguistic and psycholinguistic theories. This article describes an approach to morphological phenomena called the convergence theory, in which morphology is a graded, inter-level representation that reflects correlations among orthography, phonology and semantics.