This paper is available for the academic year 2024-25.
Li8: Morphology offers a concise overview of morphological variation in the languages of the world, provides an introduction to the descriptive and theoretical models that have been developed to analyze this variation, and summarizes the main sources of experimental and other external evidence for the evaluation of models and the validation of their claims.
The course highlights the substantive ideas about word structure and grammatical organization that underlie current morphological models and identifies any typological biases or independent theoretical commitments. Students are taught standard techniques of morphological analysis and are expected to gain facility in interpreting and evaluating analyses from different theoretical perspectives. A variety of languages are analyzed, and students are offered the opportunity to investigate questions raised in the course in relation to languages with which they are familiar or in which they have an interest.
Michaelmas (Dr Theresa Biberauer): Morphology from a syntactician's perspective
Li8.1 Introduction to Linguistic Morphology
Li8.2 Dimensions of morphological variation
Li8.3 Inflection
Li8.4 Derivation & Compounding
Li8.5 Morphology and Typology
Li8.6 Morphology and Universals
Li8.7 Morphology and Diachrony
Li8.8 Morphology and Acquisition
Lent (Prof Bert Vaux): Morphology from a phonologist's perspective
Li8.9 Prosodic Morphology
Li8.10 Morphology and Meaning: Morphology and the Lexicon, Semantics and Pragmatics
Li8.11 Psychomorphology and neuromorphology
Li8.12 Acquisition of morphology
Li8.13 Productivity and regularity
Li8.14 Blocking
Li8.15 Distributed Morphology and Word and Paradigm Morphology
Li8.16 Theory comparison (with special reference to prosodically-conditioned suppletive allomorphy)
- Matthews, P.H. 1991. Morphology. Cambridge University Press.
- Haspelmath, M. and A. Sims. 2010. Understanding Morphology, 2nd edn. London: Hodder.
- Aronoff, M. and K. Fudeman. 2010. What is Morphology?, 2nd edn. Wiley.
16 one-hour lectures, 8 one-hour supervisions.
The paper's Moodle site can be found here.
Assessment will be by a 3hr in person written exam.
Prof Bert Vaux | |
Dr Theresa Biberauer |
