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date: 18 April 2021

Abstract and Keywords

Morphology, by its very language-specific nature, poses conceptual, methodological, and empirical problems for both linguistic theory and language typology. This chapter offers an overview of major issues in morphological typology, starting with the controversial definitions of basic notions such as ‘wordform’ and ‘lexeme’, and proceeding to the classification of morphological phenomena along the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes. It is argued that traditional dichotomies such as ‘inflection’ vs. ‘derivation’ or ‘agglutination’ vs. ‘flexion’ are to by replaced by multidimensional classifications based on a broad empirical coverage of morphological phenomena attested in human languages, and that only through a mutually informed fruitful interaction of typologists and morphological theorists can an adequate cross-linguistically valid and analytically sophisticated model of morphology be attained.

Keywords: morphological theory, morphological typology, notion of word, meaning–form relation, syntagmatic, paradigmatic relations, cross-linguistic diversity

Peter M. Arkadiev

Peter Arkadiev (1982) holds a PhD in theoretical, typological and comparative linguistics from the Russian State University for the Humanities. Currently he 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 fields of interest include language typology and areal linguistics, morphology, case and alignment systems, tense-aspect, Baltic and Northwest Caucasian languages.

Marian Klamer

Professor of Austronesian and Papuan Linguistics at Leiden University. Her main research interest lies in describing and analyzing underdocumented Austrone-sian and Papuan languages in Eastern Indonesia. Klamer has published (sketch) grammars of two Austronesian languages (Kambera, 1998; Alorese, 2011) and two Papuan languages (Teiwa, 2010; Kaera, 2014), several thematic volumes and over fifty articles on a wide range of topics, including morphology, typology, language contact, and historical reconstruction of languages in Indonesia.

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