What is Morphology?, 3rd Edition

What is Morphology?, 3rd Edition

by Mark Aronoff, Kirsten Fudeman
Released November 2022
Publisher(s): Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9781119715207

Read it now on the O’Reilly learning platform with a 10-day free trial.

O’Reilly members get unlimited access to books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Start your free trial

Book description

Provides a critical introduction to the central ideas and perennial problems of morphology, fully revised and updated in a new edition

What is Morphology? is a concise, student-friendly introduction to the fundamentals of contemporary morphological theory and practice. Requiring only a basic knowledge of linguistics, this popular textbook describes morphological phenomena and their interactions with phonology, syntax, and semantics while familiarizing students with the importance of linguistic morphology as a subject of research. Each chapter contains engaging examples and student-friendly explanations to support the development of the skills necessary to analyze a wealth of classic morphological problems.

The third edition is fully updated to reflect the current state of the field, featuring a new chapter on morphology’s intersections with typology and computational linguistics. Expanded coverage of morphological productivity and processing is supported by additional exercises, examples, and further reading suggestions. Thoroughly revised chapters cover essential topics including morphemes, the lexicon, phonology, inflection, syncretism, and derived lexemes. This accessible textbook:

  • Introduces fundamental phenomena with a descriptive theme and minimal theory
  • Uses cross-linguistic data to explain and clarify new concepts
  • Provides new and revised chapters written by prominent experts in their respective areas
  • Includes answers to all exercises via a companion instructor’s website

The latest edition of What is Morphology? remains the ideal textbook for undergraduate and graduate linguistics students, researchers and scholars unfamiliar with linguistic morphology, and professionals involved in industrial applications of linguistics such as speech recognition, natural language understanding, machine translation, text-to-speech, and natural language generation.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Praise for What is Morphology? Third Edition
  3. Fundamentals of Linguistics
  4. Title page
  5. Copyright
  6. Preface
  7. Acknowledgments
  8. Abbreviations
  9. Remarks on Transcription
  10. The International Phonetic Alphabet
  11. About the Companion Website
  12. 1 Thinking about Morphology and Morphological Analysis
    1. 1.1 What is Morphology?
    2. 1.2 Morphemes
    3. 1.3 Morphology in Action
    4. 1.4 Background and Beliefs
    5. 1.5 Introduction to Morphological Analysis
    6. 1.6 Summary
    7. Introduction to Kujamaat Jóola
    8. Further Reading
    9. Exercises
  13. 2 Words and Lexemes
    1. 2.1 What is a Word?
    2. 2.2 Empirical Tests for Wordhood
    3. 2.3 Types of Words
    4. 2.4 Inflection vs. Derivation
    5. 2.5 Two Approaches to Morphology: Item-and-Arrangement, Item-and-Process
    6. 2.6 The Lexicon
    7. 2.7 Summary
    8. Kujamaat Jóola Noun Classes
    9. Further Reading
    10. Exercises
  14. 3 Morphology and Phonology
    1. 3.1 Allomorphs
    2. 3.2 Prosodic Morphology
    3. 3.3 Primary and Secondary Affixes
    4. 3.4 Linguistic Exaptation, Leveling, and Analogy
    5. 3.5 Morphophonology and Secret Languages
    6. 3.6 Summary
    7. Kujamaat Jóola Morphophonology
    8. Further Reading
    9. Exercises
  15. 4 Derivation and the Lexicon
    1. 4.1 The Saussurean Sign
    2. 4.2 Motivation and Compositionality
    3. 4.3 Derivation and Structure
    4. 4.4 Lexicalization
    5. 4.5 Summary
    6. Derivation in Kujamaat Jóola
    7. Further Reading
    8. Exercises
  16. 5 Derivation and Semantics
    1. 5.1 The Polysemy Problem
    2. 5.2 The Semantics of Derived Lexemes
    3. 5.3 Summary
    4. Derivation and Verbs in Kujamaat Jóola
    5. Further Reading
    6. Exercises
  17. 6 Inflection
    1. 6.1 What is Inflection?
    2. 6.2 Inflection vs. Derivation
    3. 6.3 Inventory of Inflectional Morphology Types
    4. 6.4 Syncretism
    5. 6.5 Typology
    6. 6.6 Summary
    7. Agreement in Kujamaat Jóola
    8. Further Reading
    9. Exercises
  18. 7 Morphology and Syntax
    1. 7.1 Morphological vs. Syntactic Inflection
    2. 7.2 Structural Constraints on Morphological Inflection
    3. 7.3 Inflection and Universal Grammar
    4. 7.4 Grammatical Function Change
    5. 7.5 Summary
    6. Kujamaat Jóola Verb Morphology
    7. Further Reading
    8. Exercises
  19. 8 Morphological Productivity and the Mental Lexicon
    1. 8.1 What is Morphological Productivity?
    2. 8.2 Productivity and Structure: Negative Prefixes in English
    3. 8.3 Degrees of Productivity
    4. 8.4 Salience and Productivity
    5. 8.5 Testing Productivity
    6. 8.6 The Mental Lexicon, Psycholinguistics, and Neurolinguistics
    7. 8.7 Conclusion
    8. Further Reading
    9. Exercises
  20. 9 Computational Morphology
    1. 9.1 Introduction
    2. 9.2 Early Work
    3. 9.3 Problem Specification
    4. 9.4 Knowledge-based Methods
    5. 9.5 Data-Driven Methods
    6. 9.6 Hybrid Models
    7. 9.7 Resources for Computational Morphology
    8. Acknowledgments
    9. Further Reading
    10. Exercises
  21. Glossary
  22. References
  23. Index
  24. End User License Agreement

Product information

  • Title: What is Morphology?, 3rd Edition
  • Author(s): Mark Aronoff, Kirsten Fudeman
  • Release date: November 2022
  • Publisher(s): Wiley-Blackwell
  • ISBN: 9781119715207