A recent debate in the morphological literature concerns the status of derivational affixes. While some linguists (Marantz 1997(Marantz , 2001Marvin 2003) consider derivational affixes a type of functional morpheme that realizes a categorial head, others (Lowenstamm 2015; De Belder 2011) argue that derivational affixes are roots. Our proposal, which finds its empirical basis in a study of Dutch derivational affixes, takes a middle position. We argue that there are two types of derivational affixes: some that are roots (i.e. lexical morphemes) and others that are categorial heads (i.e. functional morphemes). Affixes that are roots show 'flexible' categorial behavior, are subject to 'lexical' phonological rules, and may trigger idiosyncratic meanings. Affixes that realize categorial heads, on the other hand, are categorially rigid, do not trigger 'lexical' phonological rules nor allow for idiosyncrasies in their interpretation.

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This article argues against the hypothesis that roots are stored in the lexicon without categorial specification, such as noun and verb, as proposed in Marantz (1997Marantz ( , 2001. On the basis of evidence from Dutch, we show that certain generalizations and rules cannot be expressed without having roots that are lexically specified for their category. Furthermore, we show that the arguments put forward by Barner and Bale (2002) for categorial underspecification are not valid with respect to the data from Dutch. Finally, following Kiparsky (1997), we show that analyses of denominal verbs in English that embrace the categorial underspecification hypothesis run into serious problems. We conclude that roots are stored in the lexicon with a categorial specification.

Dutch dialects show an enormous amount of variation with respect to the verbal inflectional paradigm. To wit, some dialects only have two forms in the present tense indicative to express all persons in singular and plural, whereas other dialects use three or even four different forms to do so. However, not every inflectional pattern is equally likely to occur; some patterns are found nowhere, whereas others are geographically widespread and stable over time. We will show that these recurring patterns of syncretism are also typologically well-attested. The recurring pattern involves neutralization of a morphosyntactic distinction in the marked half of the paradigm. More specifically, we see that plural and past tense are neutralizing contexts. We will show that a grammar that solely uses underspecification of affixes to account for the observed syncretisms, misses a generalization that can only be expressed by impoverishment rules or some other equivalent paradigmatic means.