Khari’s Reviews > Understanding Morphology: Second Edition > Status Update

The other thing is I started reading this to study for a comprehensive test I was supposed to take...well that fell through, so should I bother with the comprehension questions, or just read the information and move on with my life?

Picking this book up again after years of not working on it I am struck by how not beginner friendly it is. This is not an appropriate 1st year morphology book. At least, I don't think it is. It's got so much jargon in it, and I liked morphology, so I should remember most of this jargon, and I don't. Suppletive? What does that mean? I can't just drag it out easily.

And in this part we come to that ever present danger of having the book say something is ungrammatical that makes perfect sense to me. For instance, "The constant development was applauded" Is apparently ungrammatical. But it makes perfect sense to me. For instance in the soviet union the constant development was applauded.

I have a sneaking suspicion I will have to read this chapter over again.

I really don't like grammar. Syntactic functions just boggle me. Who spends this much time analyzing who did what in a sentence and differentiating between all the different ways to say who did what?

I am incredibly glad that I studied all of the verb features BEFORE I read this chapter. All through the book, they talked about things like Passive, Aorist, Anticausative, etc. and I didn't know what they meant, so I made a list of all of the features and studied. But I still didn't get it, now I'm in chapter 11 and FINALLY they are explaining what these things mean! Thankfully I have a framework to hang it on now.