This paper is SUSPENDED for the academic year 2023-24.
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.
Li8.1 introduction to and overview of morphological analysis
Li8.2 decomposition
Li8.3 inflection and derivation
Li8.4 gender and agreement
Li8.5 diachrony
Li8.6 psychomorphology and neuromorphology
Li8.7 acquisition of morphology
Li8.8 productivity and exponence
Li8.9 morphomes and priscianic phenomena
Li8.10 blocking
Li8.11 opacity
Li8.12 Lexical Phonology and Morphology
Li8.13 Prosodic Morphology
Li8.14 Distributed Morphology
Li8.15 Word and Paradigm Morphology and Usage-Based 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 a take home coursework assessment:
Three essays to be submitted online during the exam period (each essay should be no more than 1500 words). Each answer contributes a third of the total mark.
Prof Bert Vaux |
