Morphology

Catalog description

What are words? Is there evidence for them having internal structure? What is the relationship between what can intuitively be understood as “forms of the same word”? Is there a distinct word-building module of the grammar, or do words simply arise from the interaction of the syntax and phonology? These are the kinds of big-picture questions that morphologists ask. This course offers an in-depth introduction to the field of linguistic morphology, which investigates the form of “words”—whatever those are. We will investigate a number of morphological phenomena in a diverse sample of languages (e.g. allomorphy, suppletion, syncretism, inflection and derivation, morphomes, paradigmatic structure, lexicalism, bracketing paradoxes, the relationship between morphology and syntax/phonology, *ABA phenomena, etc.), culminating with an introduction to Distributed Morphology, a current and highly-influential theory of morphology and the architecture of the grammar.