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This volume explores the multiple aspects of morphological complexity, offering typological, acquisitional, sociolinguistic, and diachronic perspectives. The analyses are based on rich empirical data from a wide range of languages, as well as experimental data from artificial language learning.
List of contents
- 1: Peter Arkadiev and Francesco Gardani: Introduction: Complexities in morphology
- Part I: The language-specific perspective
- 2: Jeff Parker and Andrea D. Sims: Irregularity, paradigmatic layers, and the complexity of inflection class systems: A study of Russian nouns
- 3: John Mansfield and Rachel Nordlinger: Demorphologization and deepening complexity in Murrinhpatha
- 4: Felicity Meakins and Sasha Wilmoth: Overabundance resulting from language contact: Complex cell-mates in Gurindji Kriol
- 5: Fabiola Henri, Gregory Stump, and Delphine Tribout: Derivation and the morphological complexity of three French-based creoles
- 6: Michele Loporcaro: Simplification and complexification in Wolof noun morphology and morphosyntax
- Part II: The crosslinguistic perspective
- 7: Johanna Nichols: Canonical complexity
- 8: Francesca Di Garbo: The complexity of grammatical gender and language ecology
- 9: Adam J. R. Tallman and Patience Epps: Morphological complexity, autonomy, and areality in western Amazonia
- Part III: The acquisitional perspective
- 10: John H. McWhorter: Radical analyticity as a diagnostic of adult acquisition
- 11: Aleksandrs Berdicevskis and Arturs Semenuks: Different trajectories of morphological overspecification and irregularity under imperfect language learning
- 12: Marianne Mithun: Where is morphological complexity?
- 13: Östen Dahl: Morphological complexity and the minimum description length approach
About the author
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 Axel Holvoet and Björn 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 Zürich. He is co-Editor-in-Chief of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Romance Linguistics.
Summary
This volume explores the multiple aspects of morphological complexity, offering typological, acquisitional, sociolinguistic, and diachronic perspectives. The analyses are based on rich empirical data from a wide range of languages, as well as experimental data from artificial language learning.
