The asymmetric properties of morphological phases, their relevance for information processing

This paper provides evidence to show that morphological phases are asymmetric relations. We take morphological phases to be parallel to syntactic phases, i.e., they share basic properties, however, they cannot be equated. In both cases they are headed by a functional category, they constitute local domains for interpretation and spell-out, as well as they exhibit impenetrability in specific ways. We point out the shortcomings of current search engines, and provide evidence that they lack fine-grained morphological analysis. We show that morphological phases are recoverable by an LR parser, which can play a crucial role in an efficient information processing system.