Morphological Complexity

Cambridge Studies in Linguistics

by Matthew Baerman, Dunstan Brown, Greville G. Corbett

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.

ebook

Published July 13, 2017

Reviews

[James T · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goodreads probably isn't where people are looking for reviews of academic books, but I'd recommend this to a linguist working on a morphologically complex language or on morphological theory. As an amateur conlanger, I also found the cross-linguistic survey in chapters 1-6 useful for generating ideas. Chapter 7 introduces metrics to quantify morphological complexity, with a case study applying those metrics to Chinantec. The chapter is technical and a bit hard to follow, especially if you aren't familiar with Network Morphology, but fascinating if you're able to work through the details.