Abstract
In this chapter, we will locate the approach that is adopted in this work in the larger field of theoretical morphology. To do so, we will discuss several points: each of them will be illustrated using examples taken from Latin inflectional morphology.
The point of departure will be an overview of the terminology that is used throughout this work (Sect. 1.1). We will then discuss several classifications of morphological theories (Sect. 1.2), from the traditional distinction between Item-and-Arrangement, Item-and-Process and Word-and-Paradigm models operated by Hockett (1954) up to the recent characterization of constructive and abstractive approaches proposed in Blevins (2006, 2016), highlighting the specific aspects on which each of the discussed classifications is based. In Sect. 1.3, we will focus on implicative relations, contrasting different ways in which they can be formulated, in terms of generalizations on exponents (Sect. 1.3.1), on stems (Sect. 1.3.2) or on inflected wordforms (Sect. 1.3.3). We will then add a quantitative dimension to the picture (Sect. 1.4), showing the importance of considering also non-categorical implicative relations. Lastly, in Sect. 1.5 we will explain the choices that have been made in this work regarding each of the topics discussed in the previous sections.