Mark Aronoff

Mark Aronoff is best known for his 1976 MIT Press book "Word Formation in Generative Grammar," which helped establish morphology as a distinct subfield within linguistics. He argued that word-formation rules operate autonomously from syntax, giving morphology its own theoretical domain.

Aronoff is a Distinguished Professor at Stony Brook University, where he has spent much of his academic career. He has also served as editor of the journal Language, the flagship publication of the Linguistic Society of America.

Yes, Aronoff has conducted significant research on sign language morphology, collaborating with researchers such as Irit Meir and Wendy Sandler. His work has helped demonstrate that the principles of morphological organization extend to the visual-spatial modality of sign languages.

Aronoff's work treats the lexicon as an active component where new words are formed according to systematic patterns rather than a passive list of stored items. He argued that word-formation rules take stems and existing words as their input, giving morphology its own place between phonology and syntax.