Understanding and Measuring Morphological Complexity

Understanding and Measuring Morphological Complexity
Author: Matthew Baerman
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2015
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0198723768

This book aims to assess the nature of morphological complexity, and the properties that distinguish it from the complexity manifested in other components of language. Chapters highlight novel perspectives on conceptualizing morphological complexity, and offer concrete means for measuring, quantifying and analysing it.

Morphological Complexity

Morphological Complexity
Author: Matthew Baerman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2017-06-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1107120640

This book characterises the diverse morphological complexity we find in the languages of the world. Richly illustrated, examples are drawn from dozens of different languages and are subjected to rigorous quantitative analysis. It will be ideal reading for academic researchers and graduate students of linguistics, with a special interest in morphology and English language.

Understanding Morphology

Understanding Morphology
Author: Martin Haspelmath
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2013-10-28
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1134645961

This new edition of Understanding Morphology has been fully revised in line with the latest research. It now includes 'big picture' questions to highlight central themes in morphology, as well as research exercises for each chapter. Understanding Morphology presents an introduction to the study of word structure that starts at the very beginning. Assuming no knowledge of the field of morphology on the part of the reader, the book presents a broad range of morphological phenomena from a wide variety of languages. Starting with the core areas of inflection and derivation, the book presents the interfaces between morphology and syntax and between morphology and phonology. The synchronic study of word structure is covered, as are the phenomena of diachronic change, such as analogy and grammaticalization. Theories are presented clearly in accessible language with the main purpose of shedding light on the data, rather than as a goal in themselves. The authors consistently draw on the best research available, thus utilizing and discussing both functionalist and generative theoretical approaches. Each chapter includes a summary, suggestions for further reading, and exercises. As such this is the ideal book for both beginning students of linguistics, or anyone in a related discipline looking for a first introduction to morphology.

The Oxford Handbook of Morphological Theory

The Oxford Handbook of Morphological Theory
Author: Jenny Audring
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 751
Release: 2019
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0199668981

Morphology, the science of words, is a complex theoretical landscape, where a multitude of frameworks, each with their own tenets and formalism, compete for the explanation of linguistic facts. The Oxford Handbook of Morphological Theory is a comprehensive guide through this jungle of morphological theories. It provides a rich and up-to-date overview of theoretical frameworks, from Structuralism to Optimality Theory and from Minimalism to Construction Morphology...

Morphological Complexity

Morphological Complexity
Author: Matthew Baerman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2017-06-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1108210589

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.

The Cambridge Handbook of Morphology

The Cambridge Handbook of Morphology
Author: Andrew Hippisley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 1442
Release: 2016-11-24
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1316712451

The Cambridge Handbook of Morphology describes the diversity of morphological phenomena in the world's languages, surveying the methodologies by which these phenomena are investigated and the theoretical interpretations that have been proposed to explain them. The Handbook provides morphologists with a comprehensive account of the interlocking issues and hypotheses that drive research in morphology; for linguists generally, it presents current thought on the interface of morphology with other grammatical components and on the significance of morphology for understanding language change and the psychology of language; for students of linguistics, it is a guide to the present-day landscape of morphological science and to the advances that have brought it to its current state; and for readers in other fields (psychology, philosophy, computer science, and others), it reveals just how much we know about systematic relations of form to content in a language's words - and how much we have yet to learn.

Morphological Perspectives

Morphological Perspectives
Author: Matthew Baerman
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 474
Release: 2019-04-17
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1474446027

Morphological Perspectives takes words as the starting point for any questions about linguistic structure: their form, their internal structure, their paradigmatic extensions, and their role in expressing and manipulating syntactic configurations.

Word Knowledge and Word Usage

Word Knowledge and Word Usage
Author: Vito Pirrelli
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 621
Release: 2020-04-20
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110432447

Word storage and processing define a multi-factorial domain of scientific inquiry whose thorough investigation goes well beyond the boundaries of traditional disciplinary taxonomies, to require synergic integration of a wide range of methods, techniques and empirical and experimental findings. The present book intends to approach a few central issues concerning the organization, structure and functioning of the Mental Lexicon, by asking domain experts to look at common, central topics from complementary standpoints, and discuss the advantages of developing converging perspectives. The book will explore the connections between computational and algorithmic models of the mental lexicon, word frequency distributions and information theoretical measures of word families, statistical correlations across psycho-linguistic and cognitive evidence, principles of machine learning and integrative brain models of word storage and processing. Main goal of the book will be to map out the landscape of future research in this area, to foster the development of interdisciplinary curricula and help single-domain specialists understand and address issues and questions as they are raised in other disciplines.

Memorization and the Compound-Phrase Distinction

Memorization and the Compound-Phrase Distinction
Author: Marcel Schlechtweg
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2018-01-09
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110570866

Over the last decades, it has been hotly debated whether and how compounds, i.e. word-formations, and phrases differ from each other. The book discusses this issue by investigating compounds and phrases from a structural, semantic-functional and, crucially, cognitive perspective. The analysis focuses on compounds and phrases that are composed of either an adjective and a noun or two nouns in German, French and English. Having distinguished compounds from phrases on structural and semantic-functional grounds, the author claims that compounds are by their nature more appropriate to be stored in the mental lexicon than phrases and supports his argument with empirical evidence from new psycholinguistic studies. In sum, the book maintains the separation between compounds and phrases and reflects upon its cognitive consequences.

Information Theory and Language

Information Theory and Language
Author: Łukasz Dębowski
Publisher: MDPI
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2020-12-15
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 3039360264

“Information Theory and Language” is a collection of 12 articles that appeared recently in Entropy as part of a Special Issue of the same title. These contributions represent state-of-the-art interdisciplinary research at the interface of information theory and language studies. They concern in particular: • Applications of information theoretic concepts such as Shannon and Rényi entropies, mutual information, and rate–distortion curves to the research of natural languages; • Mathematical work in information theory inspired by natural language phenomena, such as deriving moments of subword complexity or proving continuity of mutual information; • Empirical and theoretical investigation of quantitative laws of natural language such as Zipf’s law, Herdan’s law, and Menzerath–Altmann’s law; • Empirical and theoretical investigations of statistical language models, including recently developed neural language models, their entropies, and other parameters; • Standardizing language resources for statistical investigation of natural language; • Other topics concerning semantics, syntax, and critical phenomena. Whereas the traditional divide between probabilistic and formal approaches to human language, cultivated in the disjoint scholarships of natural sciences and humanities, has been blurred in recent years, this book can contribute to pointing out potential areas of future research cross-fertilization.