MORPHOLOGICAL COMPLEXITY by Matthew Baerman, Dunstan Brown, Greville G. Corbett ( 9781107120648 )

Item Details

Title:

MORPHOLOGICAL COMPLEXITY

By:

Matthew Baerman, Dunstan Brown, Greville G. Corbett

Format:

Hardback

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£99.99

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£89.99

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ISBN 10:

1107120640

ISBN 13:

9781107120648

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Publisher:

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Pub. date:

22 June, 2017

Series:

Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 153

Pages:

200

Description:

This book characterises the diverse morphological complexity we find in the languages of the world.

Synopsis:

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.

Illustrations:

5 b/w illus. 150 tables

Publication:

Imprint:

Cambridge University Press

Returns:

Returnable

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