The Complexities of Morphology
ISBN: 9780191893346
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Oxford University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Sociolinguistics Grammar Syntax and Morphology;

This volume explores the multiple aspects of morphological complexity, investigating primarily whether certain aspects of morphology can be considered more complex than others, and how that complexity can be measured. The book opens with a detailed introduction from the editors that critically assesses the foundational assumptions that inform contemporary approaches to morphological complexity. In the chapters that follow, the volume's expert contributors approach the topic from typological, acquisitional, sociolinguistic, and diachronic perspectives; the concluding chapter offers an overview of these various approaches, with a focus on the minimum description length principle. The analyses are based on rich empirical data from both well-known languages such as Russian and lesser-studied languages from Africa, Australia, and the Americas, as well as experimental data from artificial language learning.


Peter Arkadiev, Senior Researcher, Institute of Slavic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences,Francesco Gardani, Professor of Romance Linguistics, University of Zurich

Peter Arkadiev is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Assistant Professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities. His research interests include language typology and areal linguistics, morphology, case and alignment systems, tense and aspect, and Baltic and Northwest Caucasian languages. He is the co-editor of Contemporary Approaches to Baltic Linguistics (with Alex Holvoet and Bj�rn Wiemer) and Borrowed Morphology (with Francesco Gardani and Nino Amiridze), both published by De Gruyter in 2015

Francesco Gardani is Professor of Romance Linguistics at the University of Z�rich. His research cuts across the fields of Romance and theoretical linguistics, focussing on morphology, language contact, and linguistic typology. He is the author of Borrowing of Inflectional Morphemes in Language Contact (Peter Lang, 2008) and Dynamics of Morphological Productivity: The Evolution of Noun Classes from Latin to Italian (Brill, 2013). He is co-Editor-in-Chief of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Romance Linguistics.

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