Network Morphology

A study of word structure using a specific theoretical framework known as 'Network Morphology'.

Morphology is particularly challenging, because it is pervaded by irregularity and idiosyncrasy. This book is a study of word structure using a specific theoretical framework known as 'Network Morphology'. It describes the systems of rules which determine the structure of words by construing irregularity as a matter of degree, using examples from a diverse range of languages and phenomena to illustrate. Many languages share common word building strategies and many diverge in interesting ways. These strategies can be understood by distinguishing different notions of 'default'. The Network Morphology philosophy promotes the use of computational implementation to check theories. The accompanying website provides the computer coded version of the Network Morphology model of word structure for readers to test, customize and develop. This book will be a valuable contribution to the fields of linguistic typology and morphology and will be welcomed by researchers and graduate students in these areas.

A revival of interest in morphology has occurred during recent years. The Yearbook of Morphology series, published since 1988, has proven to be an eminent support for this upswing of morphological research, since it contains articles on topics which are central in the current theoretical debates which are frequently referred to. The Yearbook of Morphology 2000 focuses on the relation between morphology and syntax. First, a number of articles is devoted to the ways in which morphological features can be expressed in the grammar of natural languages, both by morphological and syntactic devices. This also raises the more general issue of how we have to conceive of the relation between form and (grammatical) meaning. Several formalisms for inflectional paradigms are proposed. In addition, this volume deals with the demarcation between morphology and syntax: to which extent can syntactic principles and generalizations be used for a proper account of the morphology of a language? The languages discussed are Potawatomi, Latin, Greek, Romanian, West-Greenlandic, and German. A special feature of this volume is a section devoted to the analysis of the morphosyntax of a number of Austronesian languages, which are also relevant for deepening our insights into the relation between our morphology and syntax. Audience: Theoretical, descriptive, and historical linguists, morphologists, phonologists, computational linguists, and psycholinguists will find this book of interest.

The papers in this volume derive from the 13th International Morphology Meeting (Vienna 2008). They all address the main topic of the meeting, viz. variation and change in morphology. Inflectional and derivational morphology are represented on equal terms. The focus is on cases of language-internal variation, such as pattern competition, base variation, form–function mismatches, or morphological pleonasm. Other recurring themes are language contact as a cause of variation, the output-orientedness of morphological patterns, and linguistic economy.The contributions cover a wide variety of languages, both Indo-European (Romance, Germanic and Slavic; Latin, Lithuanian and Romani) and non-Indo-European (Hungarian, Maay, Chinese).

The Cambridge Handbook of Morphology describes the diversity of morphological phenomena in the world's languages, surveying the methodologies by which these phenomena are investigated and the theoretical interpretations that have been proposed to explain them. The Handbook provides morphologists with a comprehensive account of the interlocking issues and hypotheses that drive research in morphology; for linguists generally, it presents current thought on the interface of morphology with other grammatical components and on the significance of morphology for understanding language change and the psychology of language; for students of linguistics, it is a guide to the present-day landscape of morphological science and to the advances that have brought it to its current state; and for readers in other fields (psychology, philosophy, computer science, and others), it reveals just how much we know about systematic relations of form to content in a language's words - and how much we have yet to learn.

A revival of interest in morphology has occurred during recent years. The Yearbook of Morphology series, published since 1988, has proven to be an eminent support for this upswing of morphological research, since it contains articles on topics which are central in the current theoretical debates which are frequently referred to. The Yearbook of Morphology 1999 focuses on diachronic morphology, and shows, in a number of articles by renowned specialists, how complicated morphological systems develop in the course of time. In addition, this volume deals with a number of hotly debated issues in theoretical morphology: its interaction with phonology (including Optimality Theory), the relation between inflection and word formation, and the formal modeling of inflectional systems. A special feature of this volume is an article on morphology in sign language, a very new and exciting area of research in linguistics. The relevant evidence comes from a wide variety of languages, amongst which Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages are prominent. Audience: Theoretical, descriptive, and historical linguists, morphologists, phonologists, and psycholinguists will find this book of interest.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Systems and Frameworks for Computational Morphology, SFCM 2011, held in Zurich, Switzerland in August 2011. The eight revised full papers presented together with one invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 13 submissions. The papers address various topics in computational morphology and the relevance of morphology to computational linguistics more broadly.

This volume sets out four different default-based frameworks for describing morphology. Major proponents of these frameworks address a range of questions about the role of defaults in the lexicon, such as the place of morphology in the grammar and the challenge of meaning-form dissociations that plagues morphology.

This volume provides an introduction to word and paradigm models of morphology and the general perspectives on linguistic morphology that they embody. The recent revitalization of these models is placed in the larger context of the intellectual lineage that extends from classical grammars to current information-theoretic and discriminative learning paradigms. The synthesis of this tradition outlined in the volume highlights leading ideas about the organization of morphological systems that are shared by word and paradigm approaches, along with strategies that have been developed to formalize these ideas, and ways in which the ideas have been validated by experimental methodologies. An extended comparison of contemporary word and paradigm variants isolates the central assumptions about morphological units and relations that distinguish implicational from realizational models and clarifies the relation of these models to morpheme-based accounts. Designed to be accessible to a wide readership, this book will serve both as an introduction to morphology and morphological theory from the word and paradigm perspective for non-specialists, and for morphologists, as a detailed account of the history of the ideas that underlie these models.

This book provides a view of where the field of morphology has been and where it is today within a particular theoretical framework, gathering up new and representative work in morphology by both eminent and emerging scholars, and touching on a very wide range of topics, approaches, and theoretical points of view. These seemingly disparate articles have a common touchstone in their focus on a word-based, paradigmatic approach to morphology. The chapters in this book elaborate on these basic themes, from the further exploration of paradigms, to studies involving words, stems, and affixes, to examinations of competition, inheritance, and defaults, to investigations of morphomes, to ways that morphology interacts with other parts of the language from phonology to sociolinguistics and applied linguistics. The editors and contributors dedicate this volume to Prof. Mark Aronoff for his profound influence on the field.