Morphological Perspectives

Places morphology at the centre of its own research agenda

In a field still dominated by syntactic perspectives, it is easy to overlook the words that are the irreducible building blocks of language. Morphological Perspectives takes words as the starting point for any questions about linguistic structure: their form, their internal structure, their paradigmatic extensions, and their role in expressing and manipulating syntactic configurations. With a team of authors that run the typological gamut of languages, this book examines these questions from multiple perspectives, both the canonical and the non-canonical. By taking these questions seriously, and letting loose a full battery of analytical techniques, the following chapters not only celebrate the pioneering work of Greville G. Corbett but present new thinking on traditional approaches, including the paradigm, deponency and morphological features.

Key Features
*Full ranging examination of morphology's role in its canonical and non-canonical aspects
*Chapters by some of the key experts in morphological typology including Bernard Comrie, Andrew Spencer, Mark Aronoff, Maria Polinsky, Oliver Bonami, Johanna Nichols and Nicholas Evans
*New thinking on traditional approaches, including the paradigm, deponency and morphological features



Matthew Baerman is a Senior Research Fellow in the Surrey Morphology Group at the University of Surrey

Oliver Bond is Lecturer in Linguistics in the Surrey Morphology Group at the University of Surrey.

Andrew Hippisley is Professor of Linguistics and Linguistics Programme Director at the University of Kentucky

Cover image: Polyphon Gefasstes Weiss, Paul Klee, 1930 © akg-images

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ISBN 978-1-4744-4600-6
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Acknowledgements; list of abbreviations; 1: Taking the Morphological Perspective, Matthew Baerman, Oliver Bond and Andrew Hippisley; 2: Canonical Compounds, Andrew Spencer; 3: How (Non-)Canonical Is Italian Morphology?, Anna M. Thornton; 4: Waiting For the Word: Distributed Deponency and The Semantic Interpretation of Number in the Nen Verb, Nicholas Evans; 5: Feature Duality, Matthew Baerman; 6: Canonical Syncretism and Chomsky's S, Mark Aronoff; 7: Canonical Tough Cases, Johanna Nichols; 8: Paradigm Uniformity and the French Gender System, Olivier Bonami and Gilles Boyé; 9: Case Loss in Pronominal Systems: Evidence From Bulgarian, Alexander Krasovitsky; 10: Measuring the Complexity of the Stem Alternation Patterns of Spanish Verbs, Enrique L. Palancar; 11: Verb Root Ellipsis, Bernard Comrie and Raoul Zamponi; 12: Bound But Still Independent: Quotative and Verificative in Archi, Marina Chumakina; 13: To Agree or Not to Agree? - A Typology of Sporadic Agreement, Sebastian Fedden; 14: Where Are Gender Values And How Do I Get To Them?, Oliver Bond; 15: Focus as a Morphosyntactic and Morphosemantic Feature, Irina Nikolaeva; 16: When Agreement and Binding Go Their Separate Ways: Generic Second Person Pronoun in Russian, Maria Polinsky; 17: Rara and Theory Testing in Typology: The Natural Evolution Of Non-Canonical Agreement, Erich Round; Notes