Murrinhpatha is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken in a region of tropical savannah and tidal inlets on the north coast of the continent. Some 3000 speakers live mostly in the towns of Wadeye and Nganmarriyanga, though they maintain close ties to their traditional lands, totems and spirit ancestors. Murrinhpatha word structure is highly complex, and quite distinct from the better-known Pama-Nyungan languages of central and southern Australia. Murrinhpatha is characterised by prolific compounding, clitic clusters, cumulative inflection, irregular allomorphy and phonological assimilation. This book provides a comprehensive account of these phenomena, giving particular attention to questions of morphological constituency, lexical storage, and whether there is really such thing as a ‘word’ unit.

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 focuses on the theoretical and analytical challenges that languages with complex morphologies pose for the theory and typology of word-level prosodic phenomena. The morphological complexity and phonological length that are characteristic of words in these languages make them a particularly fruitful ground for investigating the effects of both phonological and morphological factors in the assignment of prominence. The first three chapters in the volume explore general theoretical issues pertaining to word prominence in synthetic languages, including the issue of 'wordhood' and the empirical, theoretical, and methodological issues with delineating word-level prominence and the higher-level prosodic phenomena in these languages. These are followed by a series of case studies on stress, accent, and tone in a geographically and genetically diverse set of languages with highly synthetic morphologies including languages of the Americas, Europe and Asia, and Australia. The volume adopts an interdisciplinary perspective, combining phonetic, phonological, and morphosyntactic insights. It will be of interest not only to phonologists and morphologists, but to all those interested in the typological and theoretical issues relating to polysynthetic languages.

This book is the first full evaluation of the Proto-Australian hypothesis, which proposes that most Australian languages have a common ancestor: Proto-Australian [PA]. Using the standard methodologies of historical linguistics, the authors show that nearly all Australian languages descend from PA. Given that PA was a single language, it was spoken only in a small area of Australia. Its descendants have spread across the continent. Current theories of language spread do not offer clear motivations for large-scale spread in hunter-gatherer economies. This raises significant questions for analyses of Australian prehistory and archaeology specifically, and more widely for general theories of hunter-gatherer prehistory and language spread.

The study of morphology is central to linguistics, and morphotactics – the general principles by which the parts of a word form are arranged – is essential to the study of morphology. Drawing on evidence from a range of languages, this is a comprehensive and up-to-date account of the principles of morphotactic analysis. Stump proposes that the arrangement of word forms' grammatically significant parts is an expression of the ways in which a language's morphological rules combine with one another to form more specific rules. This rule-combining approach to morphotactics has important implications for the synchronic analysis of both inflectional and derivational morphology, and it provides a solid conceptual platform for understanding both the processing of morphologically complex words and the paths of morphological change. Laying the groundwork for future research on morphotactic analysis, this is essential reading for researchers and graduate students in linguistics, and anyone interested in understanding language structure.

Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) is a nontransformational theory of linguistic structure, first developed in the 1970s by Joan Bresnan and Ronald M. Kaplan, which assumes that language is best described and modeled by parallel structures representing different facets of linguistic organization and information, related by means of functional correspondences. This volume has five parts. Part I, Overview and Introduction, provides an introduction to core syntactic concepts and representations. Part II, Grammatical Phenomena, reviews LFG work on a range of grammatical phenomena or constructions. Part III, Grammatical modules and interfaces, provides an overview of LFG work on semantics, argument structure, prosody, information structure, and morphology. Part IV, Linguistic disciplines, reviews LFG work in the disciplines of historical linguistics, learnability, psycholinguistics, and second language learning. Part V, Formal and computational issues and applications, provides an overview of computational and formal properties of the theory, implementations, and computational work on parsing, translation, grammar induction, and treebanks. Part VI, Language families and regions, reviews LFG work on languages spoken in particular geographical areas or in particular language families. The final section, Comparing LFG with other linguistic theories, discusses LFG work in relation to other theoretical approaches.

Many theories of language acquisition struggle to account for the morphological complexity and diversity of the world’s languages. This book examines the acquisition of complex morphology of Murrinhpatha, a polysynthetic language of Northern Australia. It considers semi-naturalistic data from five children (1;9-6;1) collected over a two-year period. Analysis of the Murrinhpatha data is focused on the acquisition of polysynthetic verb constructions, large irregular inflectional paradigms, and bipartite stem verbs, which all pose interesting challenges to the learner, as well as to theories of language acquisition. The book argues that morphological complexity, which broadly includes factors such as transparency, predictability/regularity, richness, type/token frequency and productivity, must become central to our understanding of morphological acquisition. It seeks to understand how acquisition is impacted by differences in morphological systems and by the ways in which children and their interlocutors use these systems.

This book represents the first comprehensive examination of templatic constructions - namely, linguistic structures involving unexpected linear stipulation - in both morphology and syntax from a typological perspective. It provides a state-of-the-art overview of the previous literature, develops a new typology for categorizing templatic constructions across grammatical domains, and examines their cross-linguistic variation by employing cutting-edge computational methods. It will be of interest to descriptive linguists seeking to gain a better sense of the diversity of the world's templatic constructions, theoretical linguists developing restrictive models of possible templates, and typologists interested in the attested range of patterns of linear stipulation and the application of new kinds of multivariate methods to cross-linguistic data. The new typological framework is illustrated in detail via a number of case studies involving languages of Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas, and numerous other templatic constructions are also considered over the course of the book.

This volume is the first handbook devoted entirely to the multitude of frameworks adopted in the field of morphology, including Minimalism, Optimality Theory, Network Morphology, Cognitive Grammar, and Canonical Typology. Following an introduction from the editors, the first part of the volume offers critical discussions of the main theoretical issues within morphology, both in word formation and in inflection, as well as providing a short history of morphological theory. In the core part of the handbook, part II, each theory is introduced by an expert in the field, who guides the reader through its principles and technicalities, its advantages and disadvantages, and its points of agreement and disagreement with alternative theories. Chapters in part III explore the bigger picture, connecting morphological theory to other subdisciplines of linguistics, such as diachronic change, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and sign language theory. The handbook is intended as a guide for morphologists from all theoretical backgrounds who want to learn more about frameworks other than their own, as well as for linguists in related subfields looking for theoretical connections with the field of morphology.