Natural Morphology

Among several current approaches to morphology, Natural Morphology is characterized by three general assumptions. First, linguistic signs are based on a general semiotic understanding of language as a cognitive tool specific to human beings. This is couched within C. S. Peirce’s conception of signs as organized according to their constructional properties and manners of referring to their interpretation as diagrams, indexes, and symbols. Second, this semiotic basis provides the heuristic means to assess the naturalness of morphological coding in terms of, among others, diagrammaticity and indexicality. Third, by referring to a semiotically defined morphological naturalness, one can assess the normalcy of a historically given linguistic system as a result of dynamic and partially conflicting systemic and extra-systemic forces (external evidence coming from such areas as language history, acquisition, pathology, or sociolinguistics. This complex picture grasps the speakers’ natural behavior as semiotic animals producing and interpreting complex signs, and at the same time, the impact of the linguistic systems reflecting different interacting and conflicting forces.