The main goal of this paper is to discuss such issues as the format under which lexical units are stored in memory, the way in which inflection and morphological derivation interact, and the very definition of morphological units, such as “stem”, “root”, “word form”, etc. More largely, two competing models of morphological competence, a ‘units-plus-rules’ model and a global model based on analogy, will be discussed.
The main focus is on nouns and adjectives (the label ‘nominals’ encompasses members of both categories) in three Romance languages: French, Catalan and Italian. These three languages display peculiar characteristics in relation to nominal inflection. In particular, French nouns and adjectives are almost always monomorphemic under a morphemic analysis; some Catalan nouns and adjectives are unmarked, while others display overt inflectional markers; finally, Italian nominals systematically display inflectional markers, i.e. they are never monomorphemic under a morphemic anal...