distributed morphology diagram: "Little furry thing. likes to sleep on my face."

that's such a beautiful hilarious and weird description, most of all: it's true, my cat does like to pretend it's a hat maybe it's my sleep deprived brain trying to find joy and fun while I cram for my finals

omg the more I stare at it the weirder it gets

anyways here is the source material:

Here’s a useful overview of Distributed Morphology from one of the main linguists who works in DM, Rolf Noyer. 

You won’t see DM in an intro linguistics course, but it’s quite a neat theory. The main premises, from Wikipedia: 

The central claim of Distributed Morphology is that there is no divide between the construction of words and sentences. The syntax is the single generative engine that forms sound-meaning correspondences - morphology does not exist in a separate component from the syntax.

This approach challenges the traditional notion of the lexicon as the unit where derived words are formed and idiosyncratic word-meaning correspondences are stored. In Distributed Morphology there is no unified Lexicon as in earlier generative treatments of word-formation. Rather, the functions that other theories ascribe to the Lexicon are distributed among other components of the grammar.

One of the key observations of DM is that both morphemes and words can combine together either predictably or idiomatically. 

For example, the meaning of “I opened the window” is can be determined from the meanings of the individual words and their relative positions, but “I let the cat out of the bag” has an additional meaning (I told a secret) that has nothing to do with cats or bags. 

Similarly, with words, a “doghouse” is a house for dogs, but a “blackboard” can be green or another colour.