Chomsky (1956, 1957) famously showed that sentences are organized as hierarchical structures, not linear strings, of words, concluding that syntax is (at least) "Context-Free Grammar (CFG)", not "Finite-State Grammar (FSG)". However, the question whether words are hierarchical structures of morphemes is controversial. In fact, not only has psycholinguistics, sentence processing in particular, assumed that words are axiomatic units, but also computational linguistics has claimed that morphology is FSG (Karttunen, 1983; Beesley Karttunen, 2003; Roark Sproat, 2007). In this paper, taking theoretical linguistics seriously, especially anti-lexicalist theories such as Distributed Morphology (Halle Marantz, 1993) that morphemes are axiomatic units, we design the computational simulation experiment and ask whether morphology is CFG or FSG. The results of computational simulation strongly indicate that words are organized as hierarchical structures of morphemes and thus morphology is CFG (O'Donnel, 2011).
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