Natural Morphology is the term the four authors of this monograph agreed on to cover the leitmotifs of their common and individual approaches in questions of theoretical morphology. The introduction summarizes the basic concepts and strategies of Natural Morphology, to be followed by Mayerthaler who deals with universal properties of inflectional morphology, and Wurzel with typological ones which depend on language specific properties of inflectional systems, and Dressler with universal and typological properties of word formation. The final chapter by Panagl is an indepth study of diachronic evidence for productivity in word formation and for the overlap of word formation with inflectional morphology.

This volume analyzes morphological and morphonological phenomena from a number of distinct Slavic languages. It does so in an innovative manner, yet also positions the analysis in the context of current morphological debates. It is thus a valuable contribution both to comparative Slavic morphology and general morphological theory. Moreover, the book is the first attempt at a theory of conversion and subtraction relevant to languages with rich inflectional morphology. It contributes to our structural understanding of the nature of word. As the first illustration of subtraction with examples from southern Slavic languages, it is an excellent source of specialist data. The book’s theoretical framework is easily accessible and applicable to other languages, which makes it attractive to researchers on Slavic languages and general linguists alike. The volume will also appeal to general morphologists, typologists, and advanced students in linguistics.

This six-volume collection draws together the most significant contributions to morphological theory and analysis which all serious students of morphology should be aware of. By comparing the stances taken by the different schools about the important issues, the reader will be able to judge the merits of each, with the benefit of evidence rather than prejudice.

Main description: The book is aimed at constructing a system of concepts for linguistic morphology. In a rigorously deductive way, these concepts are applied to the description of morphological phenomena of about 100 languages. The chapters are dedicated to such issues as grammatical case, voice, morph vs. morpheme, morphological processes, agreement and government, phonemization. Being metalinguistically oriented, the book is strongly anchored in typological studies and offers a number of descriptive case studies.

Exponence refers to the mapping of morphosyntactic structure to phonological representations, a research area which is not only highly controversial, but also approached in fundamentally different ways in theoretical morphology and phonology. This volume brings together leading specialists from morphosyntax and morphophonology. The authors address common problems, questions and solutions in both areas, and formulate a coherent research program for exponence which integrates the central insights of the last decades and provides important new challenges for the future. The book is aimed at phonologists, morphologists, and syntacticians of all theoretical persuasions at graduate level and above.

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...

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.

In spite of the central position that the concept word has among the basic units of language structure, there is no consensus as to the definition of this concept (or network of related concepts). Many perspectives are needed in order to gain even a schematic idea of what words are, how words may be composed, and what relationships there might be between words. Many linguists have put forward frameworks for describing the domain of morphology, each framework proceeding from its author's assumptions, prioritizing distinct formal and functional dimensions, and therefore entering into de facto competition. This book addresses the needs of the language scholar/student who finds her/himself engaged in morphological analysis and theorizing. It offers a guide to existing approaches, revealing how they can either complement or compete with each other.

Battistella traces the development of markedness theory as a central part of structuralist theories of language. He outlines the concepts of marked and unmarked from Prague School structuralism to present day applications in linguistic theory and cultural analysis, using the reference point of English grammar and sound structure. The author focuses on the fundamental asymmetry between terms of linguistic relationships, in which one term is more broadly defined and hence dominant (the unmarked term) while the other is more narrowly defined (the marked term). In addition to examining language-particular markedness relations evident in the structure and history of English, Battistella raises questions concerning universal asymmetries as well. He discusses the status of markedness as a unifying concept of linguistic structure and as a principle of language change.

A mainstay of functional linguistics has been the claim that linguistic elements and patterns that are frequently used in discourse become conventionalized as grammar. This book addresses the two issues that are basic to this claim: first, the question of what types of elements are frequently used in discourse and second, the question of how frequency of use affects cognitive representations. Reporting on evidence from natural conversation, diachronic change, variability, child language acquisition and psycholinguistic experimentation the original articles in this book support two major principles. First, the content of people s interactions consists of a preponderance of subjective, evaluative statements, dominated by the use of pronouns, copulas and intransitive clauses. Second, the frequency with which certain items and strings of items are used has a profound influence on the way language is broken up into chunks in memory storage, the way such chunks are related to other stored material and the ease with which they are accessed to produce new utterances.