Situating the rule-combining approach to morphotactics in a wider theoretical context, I summarize its implications for the architecture of Paradigm Function Morphology and for schema unification in Construction Morphology. I further contrast the exponence-driven conception of morphotactics embodied by the rule-combining approach with the very different word-skeletal approach to morphotactics, drawing attention to two advantages of the rule-combining approach. First, it affords a more parsimonious inventory of morphological operations than is assumed in Distributed Morphology. Second, it avoids the cumbersome theoretical commitments of Information-based Morphology (the assumptions of position-based ordering, rule anchoring, and distributional pigeonholing), which entail numerous complications in the analysis of a language’s morphotactics. The distinct assumptions on which the rule-combining approach rests (those of combination-based ordering, unanchored rules, and distributional multidetermination) afford morphotactic analyses that are at once simpler and more explanatory.

This chapter gives brief descriptions of six different contemporary theories of morphology, looking at their philosophical bases, their main concerns and leading questions, and where they stand on the balance between storage versus rules and on the status of the morpheme. The theories we consider are Distributed Morphology (DM), Construction Morphology (CxM), Paradigm Function Morphology (PFM), Natural Morphology (NM), Naïve Discriminative Learning (NDL), and the Lexical Semantic Framework (LSF).