Distibuted Morphology and You (me)

So, I've recently discovered how much I need Distributed Morphology. For those of you who don't know what DM is, it's a feature-based way of dealing with morphology in which words are broken down into nodes with feature bundles which the morphology later interprets and finds a "best fit" vocabulary item to insert. That is to say, syntax puts together all the ideas you want to express without involving the actual lexical items (just the ideas expressed in features) and only then does morphology come in and make something readable. There's some debate as to whether it's cyclic and what qualifies as a feature and so on and so forth.

Anyway, I took a class on this stuff a year and a half ago and genuinely didn't like it. I think that's because I couldn't see the use of it. Now, at that point my syntactic world was still ruled by A movement and A bar movement and Case licensing and all that. I remember quite clearly my professor trying to explain "uninterpretable features" to me in layman's terms. Now that we've had a class on Minimalism (soooo useful) I retroactively can see what the point of DM was. If syntax is features, then it makes a lot of sense for morphology to be features because then you can handle everything in one fell swoop before Spellout.

But, not knowing that DM would come back into my world, I sent a lot of my articles and handouts to be stored at my parents' house. Thus the moral of my story: this semester's bizarre theory is next semester's "aha" moment.