Inflectional Morphology

A new contribution to linguistic theory, this book presents a formal framework for the analysis of word structure in human language. It sets forth the network of hypotheses constituting Paradigm Function Morphology, a theory of inflectional form whose central insight is that paradigms play an essential role in the definition of a language's system of word structure. The theory comprises several unprecedented claims, chief among which is the claim that a language's realization rules serve as clauses in the definition of a paradigm function, an overarching construct which is indispensable for capturing certain kinds of generalizations about inflectional form. This book differs from other recent works on the same subject in that it treats inflectional morphology as an autonomous system of principles rather than as a subsystem of syntax or phonology and it draws upon evidence from a diverse range of languages in motivating the proposed conception of word structure.

The three volumes of Language typology and syntactic description offer a unique survey of syntactic and morphological structure in the languages of the world. Topics covered include parts of speech; passives; complementation; relative clauses; adverbial clauses; inflectional morphology; tense; aspect and mood; and deixis. The major ways these notions are realized u=in the languages of the world are explored, and the contributors provide brief sketches of relevant aspects of representative languages. Each volume is written in an accessible style with new concepts explained and exemplified as they are introduced. Although each volume can be read independently, together they provide a major work of reference that will serve as a manual for field workers and anyone interested in cross-linguistic generalizations.

This book offers a thorough discussion of morphological theory and is based directly on an 'inflecting' or 'fusional' language - Latin.

Proto-Slavic, the reconstructed ancestor of the Slavic languages, presents a rich inflectional system inherited from Proto-Indo-European. In this handbook all the inflectional endings of Proto-Slavic are traced back to Proto-Indo-European through a systematic comparison with the corresponding forms in related languages. Applying a redefinition of Proto-Slavic based on prehistoric loanword relations with neighbouring non-Slavic languages, Thomas Olander provides a new look at the Proto-Slavic inflectional system. The systematic, coherent and exhaustive approach laid out in the handbook paves the way for new solutions to long-standing problems of Slavic historical grammar.

A lively introduction to the study of how words are put together.

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0, Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald (Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: English Morphology, language: English, abstract: What is morphology? An easy answer would be: "It is a field of linguistics!" But it is far more complex then this reply reveals. The field of morphology studies and analyses the form of words by factorizing them into morphemes. These morphemes are the smallest units the word can be divided in. But what is the smallest unit of a word? This could also be a letter. There is one word missing, which makes the definition complete, namely 'meaning'. A proper definition of the term can be found in the OALD: "Morpheme: the smallest unit of meaning that a word can be divided into (827)." Words and morphemes are linguistic signs but even though the morpheme is considered a meaningful unit does not mean that every morpheme can be a word...