morphosyntaktischer

Morphosyntaktischer is an adjective used to describe phenomena, features, or analyses that involve the interaction between morphology and syntax. In linguistics, morphosyntax examines how morphological marking (such as case, number, tense, gender, and agreement) influences syntactic structure, and conversely how syntactic position and function shape morphological realization.

The morphosyntaktischer perspective covers a wide range of topics. It includes agreement systems, case marking, and argument structure, where inflectional forms signal grammatical relations or valency. It also addresses how word order interacts with inflection, how clitics and pronouns attach to host words, and how different languages encode syntactic roles through morphology. In languages with rich inflection, morphology can clarify who did what to whom, even when word order is relatively free; in analytic languages, syntactic arrangement often carries more of these cues.

Cross-linguistic research in this area intersects with typology, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics. It informs descriptions of languages, parsing models, and language acquisition studies by clarifying how speakers rely on morphological cues to interpret sentence structure. The term is common in German-language linguistics, where researchers frequently refer to morphosyntaktische Merkmale or Phänomene to denote features that combine morphological and syntactic properties.

Etymology and usage: the word fuses morpho- (morphology) with syntaktik (syntax), forming an adjective that can modify nouns such as Merkmale, Phänomen, or System. While the term is rooted in German, its underlying concepts are widely discussed in international morphosyntax literature.