ABSTRACT
Natural Morphology (NM) is an approach to morphology developed in Germany and Austria since the late 1970s by, in particular, Wolfgang Ullrich Dressler, Willi Mayerthaler and Wolfgang Ullrich Wurzel.1 This choice of label has irked some linguists outside the Natural Morphology circle; but the label has stuck, so it is necessary to continue using it, while consciously rejecting any evaluative connotation. It was in fact adopted in imitation of the title ‘Natural Phonology’ chosen by Stampe for his approach to phonology in the early 1970s (see e.g. Donegan and Stampe 1979). Stampe’s central suggestion is that acquiring the phonology of one’s native language is a matter of suppressing phonological processes rather than learning them. The innate language faculty with which every normal child is equipped includes a repertoire of ‘natural’ phonological processes. There are conflicts between different kinds of naturalness, however. Within phonology, processes favouring ease of production may conflict with ones favouring ease of perception, such as the aspiration of initial voiceless stops (which English fails to suppress). And, if we look beyond phonology, it is clear that if in some language all ‘natural’ processes favouring ease of production were to apply quite freely, so as to reduce all sounds to some kind of undifferentiated low-mid vowel, that ‘language’ would be useless for communication because it would be incapable of expressing any lexical, syntactic or morphological contrasts.
