Morphology And Its Interfaces

One of the most striking trends across linguistic research in recent years has been the examination of the interfaces between the various subcomponents of the language faculty. Yet, approaches to these interfaces across different theoretical frameworks differ substantially. This volume pulls together research into Morphology and its interfaces from researchers employing a variety of different theoretical and methodological perspectives: Morphology is a diverse field, and rather than aiming to collect works sharing a particular approach or framework of assumptions, this collection instead captures the diversity and provides an overview of the state of the research field while also addressing particular empirical phenomena with up-to-date analyses. The articles collected provide case studies from a diverse variety of languages revealing properties of the interfaces that morphology shares with syntax, semantics, phonology, and the lexicon, while the volume's inclusive cross-theoretical approach will serve to introduce readers to the findings of alternative frameworks and methodologies.

This book provides a view of where the field of morphology has been and where it is today within a particular theoretical framework, gathering up new and representative work in morphology by both eminent and emerging scholars, and touching on a very wide range of topics, approaches, and theoretical points of view. These seemingly disparate articles have a common touchstone in their focus on a word-based, paradigmatic approach to morphology. The chapters in this book elaborate on these basic themes, from the further exploration of paradigms, to studies involving words, stems, and affixes, to examinations of competition, inheritance, and defaults, to investigations of morphomes, to ways that morphology interacts with other parts of the language from phonology to sociolinguistics and applied linguistics. The editors and contributors dedicate this volume to Prof. Mark Aronoff for his profound influence on the field.

This monograph addresses morphology and its interfaces with phonology and syntax by examining comparative data from the Uto-Aztecan language family, and analyses involving reduplication as well as noun incorporation and related derivational morphology are provided within the framework of Distributed Morphology. Reduplication is treated by analyzing reduplicative morphemes (reduplicants) as morphological pieces (Vocabulary Items) inserted into syntactic slots at Morphological Structure. Noun incorporation constructions are analyzed as involving either incorporation (head movement in syntax, a la Baker 1988), or conflation, involving direct merger of a nominal root into verbal position (a la Hale and Keyser 2002). It is argued that denominal verb constructions should be treated as a sub-case of NI, as in Hale and Keyser (1993). Finally, the historical development of the polysynthesis parameter in Nahuatl is discussed, and a reconstruction of the likely stages of development, each of which is attested elsewhere in the family, is presented.

This volume treats the connection between syntax and morphology with a focus on L2 acquisition. This interface has been a matter of considerable interest in theoretical circles ever since Chomsky (1994) and others argued that morphological parameters form the primary locus of cross-linguistic variation. As might be expected, generative theorists working in the area of language acquisition have responded to this argument with various analyses. L2 research is no exception: A variety of researchers have begun serious explorations on the ways in which morphology may (or may not) trigger variation not only in syntax, but also in argument structure. The volume thus brings together a concentrated research effort on the topic from an L2 perspective. The volume starts off with a comprehensive introduction to the various sub-topics and ends with an extensive index.

This pioneering book provides a full-length study of inflectional syncretism, presenting a typology of its occurrence across a wide range of languages.

This books presents the most comprehensive description and analysis to date of Hebrew morphology, with an emphasis on the verbal templates. Its aim is to develop a theory of argument structure alternations which is anchored in the syntax but has systematic interfaces with the phonology and the semantics. Concretely, the monograph argues for a specific formal system centered around possible values of the head Voice. The formal assumptions are as similar as possible to those made in work on non-Semitic languages. The first part of the book (four chapters) is devoted to Hebrew; the second part (two chapters) compares the current theory with other approaches to Voice and argument structure in the recent literature.

The interface between syntax and morphology forms one of the more challenging aspects of linguistic theory and language acquisition. The papers collected here respond to that challenge from the perspective of adult second language (L2) acquisition.

The authors provide a compelling argument for a radically modular view of the human language faculty. The authors argue that complex words are generated by a dedicated rule system which interacts with the syntax on the one hand and the phonology on the other.