Morphological Complexity

Nonfiction, Reference & Language, Language Arts, Linguistics
Cover of the book Morphological Complexity by Matthew Baerman, Dunstan Brown, Greville G. Corbett, Cambridge University Press
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Author: Matthew Baerman, Dunstan Brown, Greville G. Corbett ISBN: 9781108206532
Publisher: Cambridge University Press Publication: June 22, 2017
Imprint: Cambridge University Press Language: English
Author: Matthew Baerman, Dunstan Brown, Greville G. Corbett
ISBN: 9781108206532
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Publication: June 22, 2017
Imprint: Cambridge University Press
Language: English

Inflectional morphology plays a paradoxical role in language. On the one hand it tells us useful things, for example that a noun is plural or a verb is in the past tense. On the other hand many languages get along perfectly well without it, so the baroquely ornamented forms we sometimes find come across as a gratuitous over-elaboration. This is especially apparent where the morphological structures operate at cross purposes to the general systems of meaning and function that govern a language, yielding inflection classes and arbitrarily configured paradigms. This is what we call morphological complexity. Manipulating the forms of words requires learning a whole new system of structures and relationships. This book confronts the typological challenge of characterising the wildly diverse sorts of morphological complexity we find in the languages of the world, offering both a unified descriptive framework and quantitative measures that can be applied to such heterogeneous systems.

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Inflectional morphology plays a paradoxical role in language. On the one hand it tells us useful things, for example that a noun is plural or a verb is in the past tense. On the other hand many languages get along perfectly well without it, so the baroquely ornamented forms we sometimes find come across as a gratuitous over-elaboration. This is especially apparent where the morphological structures operate at cross purposes to the general systems of meaning and function that govern a language, yielding inflection classes and arbitrarily configured paradigms. This is what we call morphological complexity. Manipulating the forms of words requires learning a whole new system of structures and relationships. This book confronts the typological challenge of characterising the wildly diverse sorts of morphological complexity we find in the languages of the world, offering both a unified descriptive framework and quantitative measures that can be applied to such heterogeneous systems.

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