Morphology (W3)

• Morphology is concerned with the study of word forms. A word is best defined in terms of internal stability (is it further divisible?) and external mobility (can it be moved to a different position in a sentence?).
• A morpheme is the smallest unit which carries meaning. An allomorph is a non-distinctive realisation of a morpheme.
• Morphology can further be divided into inflectional (concerned with the endings put on words) and derivational (involves the formation of new words).
• Affixation is the process of attaching an inflection or, more generally, a bound morpheme to a word. This can occur at the beginning or end and occasionally in the middle of a word form.
• Morphemes can be classified according to whether they are bound or free and furthermore lexical or grammatical.
• Word formation processes can be either productive or lexicalised (non-productive). There are different types of word-formation such as compounding, zero derivation (conversion), back formation and clipping.
• For any language the distinction between native and foreign elements in the lexicon is important. In English there are different affixes used here and stress also varies according to the historical source of words.

Alexiadou, Artemis (Herausgeber)
Rathert, Monika (Herausgeber)
The Syntax of Nominalizations across Languages and Frameworks
(Interface Explorations [Ie])

Kurzbeschreibung
The volume explores the syntax of nominalizations, focusing on deverbal and deadjectival nominalizations, but also discussing the syntax of genitives and the syntax of distinct readings of nominalizations. The volume investigates the morpholgy-syntax interface as well as the semantics-syntax interface in the domain of nominalizations. The theoretical frameworks include distributed morphology, and minimalist syntax. Data from a variety of languages are taken into consideration, e.g. Hebrew, Bulgarian, Serbian, French, Spanish, German and English.

Über den Autor
Artemis Alexiadou, University of Stuttgart, Germany. Monika Rathert, Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Germany.

2010 | Hardcover | RRP Euro [D] 99.95 / for USA, Canada, Mexico US$ 140.00. * ISBN 978-3-11-024586-8 Reihe: Interface Explorations [IE] 23

Melcuk, Igor
Aspects of the Theory of Morphology

The book is aimed at constructing a system of concepts for linguistic morphology in a rigorously deductive way - in order to test these concepts typologically, that is, by applying them to the description of morphological phenomena of about 100 languages. Nine chapters of 'Aspects of the Theory of Morphology' are dedicated to such major items as grammatical case, voice, morph vs. morpheme, morphological processes, etc. Two chapters deal with interfaces: the syntax-morphology interface (agreement and government) and the morphology-phonology interface (phonemization in a morphological model). Being metalinguistically oriented, the book is strongly anchored in typological studies and offers a number of descriptive case studies. Its prospective readership includes all students of language: linguists, computational linguists, anthropologists, translators.

Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt
Morphosyntactic Persistence in Spoken English

Language users are creatures of habit with a tendency to re-use linguistic material that they have produced or heard before. In other words, linguistic patterns and tokens, once used, persist in spoken discourse. The book explores the determinants of this persistence in corpus data of spoken English, drawing on regression analyses of a variety of functional, discourse-functional, cognitive, psycholinguistic, and external factors. In providing a variationist-probabilistic framework for examining the ways in which different internal and external factors influence speakers' linguistic choices, the study ultimately contributes to a theory of how spoken language works. ...