Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 March 2001
Peters sets up a very useful initial structure for classifying elements which are not yet well-defined morphemes, especially those that seem to be modelled phonologically on adult functors. Some of these primitive elements (pre-morphological items) have neither semantic content nor distributional properties that correspond to any adult morpheme, while the more advanced (protomorphological) items have begun to take on some of the syntactic/semantic characteristics of particular classes of adult-language morphemes.