The Complexities Of Morphology

This volume explores the multiple aspects of morphological complexity, offering typological, acquisitional, sociolinguistic, and diachronic perspectives. The analyses are based on rich empirical data from a wide range of languages, as well as experimental data from artificial language learning.

This volume explores the multiple aspects of morphological complexity, investigating primarily whether certain aspects of morphology can be considered more complex than others, and how that complexity can be measured. The book opens with a detailed introduction from the editors that critically assesses the foundational assumptions that inform contemporary approaches to morphological complexity. In the chapters that follow, the volume's expert contributors approach the topic from typological, acquisitional, sociolinguistic, and diachronic perspectives; the concluding chapter offers an overview of these various approaches, with a focus on the minimum description length principle. The analyses are based on rich empirical data from both well-known languages such as Russian and lesser-studied languages from Africa, Australia, and the Americas, as well as experimental data from artificial language learning.

This book characterises the diverse morphological complexity we find in the languages of the world. Richly illustrated, examples are drawn from dozens of different languages and are subjected to rigorous quantitative analysis. It will be ideal reading for academic researchers and graduate students of linguistics, with a special interest in morphology and English language.

This book aims to assess the nature of morphological complexity, and the properties that distinguish it from the complexity manifested in other components of language. Of the many ways languages have of being complex, perhaps none is as daunting as what can be achieved by inflectional morphology: this volume examines languages such as Archi, which has a 1,000,000-form verb paradigm, and Chinantec, which has over 100 inflection classes. Alongside this complexity, inflection is notable for its variety across languages: one can take two unrelated languages and discover that they share similar syntax or phonology, but one would be hard pressed to find two unrelated languages with the same inflectional systems. In this volume, senior scholars and junior researchers highlight novel perspectives on conceptualizing morphological complexity, and offer concrete means for measuring, quantifying and analysing it. Examples are drawn from a wide range of languages, including those of North America, New Guinea, Australia, and Asia, alongside a number of European languages. The book will be a valuable resource for all those studying complexity phenomena in morphology, and for theoretical linguists more generally, from graduate level upwards.

The present volume contains selected papers from the 14th International Morphology Meeting held in Budapest, 13–16 May 2010, organized under the auspices of the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The selection of papers presented here addresses problems of language use in one or another sense, covering issues of regularity, irregularity and analogy, as well as the role of frequency in morphological complexity, morphological change and language acquisition. The languages discussed include Dutch, German, Greek, Hungarian, Lovari (Romani) and Russian. The contributors are Anna Anastassiadis-Symeonidis, Mario Andreou, Márton András Baló, Dunstan Brown, Gabriela Caballero, Anna Maria Di Sciullo, Wolfgang U. Dressler, Roger Evans, Alice C. Harris, László Kálmán, Katharina Korecky-Kröll, Sabine Laaha, Laura E. Lettner, Maria Mitsiaki, Péter Rácz, Angela Ralli, Péter Rebrus, Alan K. Scott, and Miklós Törkenczy.

The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Morphology presents a state-of-the-art, detailed and exhaustive overview of all aspects of Spanish morphology, paying equal attention to the empirical complexities of the morphological system and the theoretical issues that they raise. As such, this handbook is relevant both for those interested in the facts of Spanish morphology and those interested in general morphology that want to explore how the Spanish facts illuminate our understanding of human language and current theories of morphology. This volume is also unique in its extent and coverage. Written by an international team of leading experts in the field, it contains 42 chapters divided into four sections, covering all synchronic and diachronic aspects of Spanish morphology, including inflection; derivation; compounding and other processes of word formation; the interaction of morphology with other modules of grammar and the role of morphology in language acquisition, psycholinguistics and language teaching.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.This is the first typologically-oriented book-length treatment of morphomes, systematic morphological identities, usually within inflectional paradigms, that do not map onto syntactic or semantic natural classes. In the first half of the book, Borja Herce outlines the theoretical and empirical challenges associated with the identification and definition of morphomes, and surveys their links with related notions such as syncretism, homophony, segmentation, and economy, among others. He alsopresents the different ways in which morphomic structures in a language have been observed to emerge, change, and disappear. The second part of the book contains its core contribution: a database of 120 morphomes across 79 languages from a range of families, which are presented and analysed in detail. Arange of findings emerge as a result, including the idiosyncratic nature of morphomes in the Romance languages, the existence of cross-linguistically recurrent unnatural patterns, and the preference for more natural structures even among morphomes. The database also allows further explorations of other issues such as the effect of learnability and communicative efficiency on morphological structures, and the lexical and grammatical informativity of morphs and their distribution.