Rethinking Morphology

Different theoretical positions can lead to conflicting restrictions on our understanding of what morphology is about. In this textbook, Laurie Bauer presents a new way of thinking about morphological structure one that will maximise our benefits from the existing disparate approaches available. Presenting a clear and critical overview, this book equips students with the tools to discuss morphological phenomena and to do so in relation to other linguistic contexts, including semantics, psycholinguistics and language change. Structured around the core areas of morphemic theory, word morphology, word syntax, the boundaries of morphology, and exemplars and resonances, each chapter discusses the limits, strengths and wider implications of existing theories and issues surrounding these facets of morphology.

This book is a significant novelty in the scientific and editorial landscape. Morphology is both an ancient and a new discipline that rests on Goethe's heritage and re-forms it in the present through the concepts of form and image. The latter are to be understood as structural elements of a new cultural grammar able to make the late modern world intelligible. In particular, compared to the original Goethean project, but also to C.P. Snow's idea of unifying the “two cultures”, the fields of morphological culture that are the object of this glossary have profoundly changed. The ever-increasing importance of the image as a polysemic form has made the two concepts absolutely transitive, so to speak. This is concomitant with the emergence of a culture that revolves around the image, attracting the verbal logos into its orbit. Incidentally, even the hermeneutic relationship between past and present relies more and more on the image, causing deep changes in cultural environments. Form and image are not just bridging concepts, as in the field of ancient morphology, but real transitive concepts that define the state of a culture. From the Internet to smartphones, television, advertising, etc., we are witnessing – as Horst Bredekamp observes – an immense mass of images that fill our time and affect the most diverse areas of our culture. The ancient connection between science and art recalled by Goethe emerges with unusual evidence thanks to intersecting patterns and expressive forms that are sometimes shared by different forms of knowledge. Creating a glossary and a culture of these intersections is the task of morphology, which thus enters into the boundaries between aesthetics, art, design, advertising, and sciences (from mathematics to computer science, to physics, and to biology), in order to provide the founding elements of a grammar and a syntax of the image. The latter, in its formal quality, both expressive and symbolic, is a fundamental element in the unification of the various kinds of knowledge, which in turn come to be configured, in this regard, also as styles of vision. The glossary is subdivided into contiguous sections, within a complex framework of cross-references. In addition to the two curators, the book features the collaboration of a team of scholars from the individual disciplines appearing in the glossary.

This is the completely revised, updated and enlarged 2nd edition of a classic textbook used in many English and linguistics departments in Germany for more than 20 years. It serves both as an introduction for beginners and as a companion for more advanced undergraduate and graduate students, familiarizing its readers with the major and distinctive properties of English (Standard English as well major national, regional and social varieties), including an in-depth structural comparison with German. Written in an accessible style and with many reader-friendly features (including checklists with key terms and concepts, basic and advanced exercises with solutions), the book offers a state-of-the-art-survey of the core terminology and issues of the central branches of linguistics, including an account of the major current research traditions and methodologies.

The focus of Paradigms in Word Formation: Theory and applications is on the relevance of paradigms for linguistic description. Paradigmatic organization has traditionally been considered an inherent feature of inflectional morphology, but research in the last decades clearly shows the existence of paradigms in word formation, especially in affixal derivation, often at the expense of other word-formation processes. This volume seeks to address the role that paradigms may play in the description of compounding, conversion and participles. This volume should be of interest to anyone specialized in the field of English morphology and word formation.

The Routledge Introduction to Italian Linguistics offers a systematic and comprehensive overview of the linguistic structure of the Italian language, including phonetics and phonology, morphology and morphosyntax, syntax, semantics, and sociolinguistics. The manual includes a historical sketch of the Italian language, which outlines the central phases of its emergence and process of standardization. Written in clear, concise language and taking a descriptive, theory-neutral approach, this is the ideal companion for advanced students of the Italian language and those studying Italian and Romance linguistics. After sketching the most important phases of the process of standardization of Italian and introducing the main varieties of Italian as classified from a social and geographical perspective, this introductory text addresses the core topics of Italian linguistics as pertaining to the sound system and word and sentence structure. The text adopts a descriptive approach and requires no previous knowledge of linguistics since technical terms are carefully explained and illustrated by numerous examples. Thus, it can serve as a reference tool for instructors of Italian and anyone interested in advancing their knowledge of the Italian language or familiarizing themselves with Italian linguistics.

Drawing on innovative research, the book reveals the wealth and breadth of the study of word-formation, both theoretically and empirically.

Morphology, the science of words, is a complex theoretical landscape, where a multitude of frameworks, each with their own tenets and formalism, compete for the explanation of linguistic facts. The Oxford Handbook of Morphological Theory is a comprehensive guide through this jungle of morphological theories. It provides a rich and up-to-date overview of theoretical frameworks, from Structuralism to Optimality Theory and from Minimalism to Construction Morphology...

Parameters of linguistic variation were originally conceived, within the chomskyan Principles and Parameters Theory, as UG-determined options that were associated with grammatical principles and had a rich deductive structure. This characterization of parametric differences among languages has changed significantly over the years, especially so with the advent of Minimalism. This book collects a representative sample of current generative research on the status, origin and size of parameters. Often taking diverging views, the papers in the volume address some or all of the main debated topics in parametric syntax: i.e. are parameters provided by UG, or do they constitute emergent properties arising from points of underspecification?; in which component(s) of the language faculty are parameters to be found?; do clustering effects actually hold across languages?; do macroparameters exist alongside microparameters?; are there parameter hierarchies?; which is the origin and role of parameters in the process of language acquisition? The volume is organized into two parts. Part I ("The nature of variation and parameters") brings together studies whose main goal is to discuss general issues related to parameters (or variation more generally). Part II ("Parameters in the analysis of language variation: case studies") includes a number of works that deal with the empirical basis and proper formulation of well-known particular parameters: the Null Subject Parameter, the NP/DP Parameter, the Compounding Parameter, the Wh-Parameter and the Analyticity Parameter.