The Morpheme: Its Nature and Use

The Morpheme in Current theories
Beginning with work in the 1970’s, generative linguists gradually came to see that the abandonment of morphology as a distinguishable aspect of the structure of language was probably ill-advised. Regularities of variation in shape that are sensitive to morphological content appeared to follow principles that fell outside those of phonology, and the internal organization of words seemed to have quite different grounds from the organization of words into phrases and sentences. As the
Reductionist waters of the initial results of generative inquiry receded, a lost continent of morphology came back into view. The most natural assumption for most linguists was that this was a land populated primarily by morphemes of the traditional sort, and that interpretation has persisted at
least in the rhetoric of adherents of several distinct theoretical positions.