Morphological Complexity (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, Series Number 153) - Hardcover

Baerman, Matthew; Brown, Dunstan; Corbett, Greville G.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1107120640 ISBN 13: 9781107120648

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2017

Synopsis

Inflectional morphology plays a paradoxical role in language. On the one hand it tells us useful things, for example that a noun is plural or a verb is in the past tense. On the other hand many languages get along perfectly well without it, so the baroquely ornamented forms we sometimes find come across as a gratuitous over-elaboration. This is especially apparent where the morphological structures operate at cross purposes to the general systems of meaning and function that govern a language, yielding inflection classes and arbitrarily configured paradigms. This is what we call morphological complexity. Manipulating the forms of words requires learning a whole new system of structures and relationships. This book confronts the typological challenge of characterising the wildly diverse sorts of morphological complexity we find in the languages of the world, offering both a unified descriptive framework and quantitative measures that can be applied to such heterogeneous systems.

About this title

Book Description:

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.

About the Author:

Matthew Baerman is Senior Research Fellow in the Surrey Morphology Group at the University of Surrey, whose work concentrates on the description, typology and diachrony of morphology, particularly complex infllectional systems. He is the editor of the recent Oxford Handbook of Inflection (2015).

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1107120640
• ISBN 13: 9781107120648
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 200