Introduction: The Structure of Spellout

Abstract

This chapter introduces the book by providing a summary of its major claims: that word-formation is derived through a principled order of morphological operations organized within modular components, that morphotactics enjoys structural parallelism with phonotactics, and that the ‘Distributed’ of Distributed Morphology is its key insight. The chapter provides an overview of the Basque language and the three dialectal varieties around which the analysis is developed, along with an introduction to argument structure, case assignment, and verbal syntax in the language.