'What Is the Plural of Mouse?' and Other Unhelpful Questions for Morphologists

Abstract

In this paper a number of questions about the morphology of English are posed, and it is shown that each of them carries presuppositions which may be theoretically unsupportable, because there is data which suggests that they are wrong. If we do not make theoretical assumptions, but let ourselves be guided by the data, our theoretical statements may have to be modified, sometimes in crucial ways. While this paper is, to the extent that it asks morphological questions, a contribution to what a morphological theory should comprise, the more general conclusion is that the way in which we frame questions that we expect our theory to answer can have implications for our findings, and that it is always worthwhile querying the content of our fundamental questions.