- Oxford Handbooks in Linguistics
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- The Contributors
- Introduction: Theory and Theories in Morphology
- A Short History of Morphological Theory
- Theoretical Issues in Word Formation
- Theoretical Issues in Inflection
- Structuralism
- Early Generative Grammar
- Later Generative Grammar and Beyond: Lexicalism
- Distributed Morphology
- Minimalism in Morphological Theories
- Optimality Theory and Prosodic Morphology
- Morphology in Lexical-Functional Grammar and Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar
- Natural Morphology
- Word and Paradigm Morphology
- Paradigm Function Morphology
- Network Morphology
- Word Grammar Morphology
- Morphology in Cognitive Grammar
- Construction Morphology
- Relational Morphology in the Parallel Architecture
- Canonical Typology
- Morphological Theory and Typology
- Morphological Theory and Creole Languages
- Morphological Theory and Diachronic Change
- Morphological Theory and Synchronic Variation
- Morphological Theory and First Language Acquisition
- Morphological Theory and Second Language Acquisition
- Morphological Theory and Psycholinguistics
- Morphological Theory and Neurolinguistics
- Morphological Theory and Computational Linguistics
- Morphological Theory and Sign Languages
- References
- Language Index
- Index of Names
- General Index
- Oxford Handbooks in Linguistics
Abstract and Keywords
There has been a broad resurgence in word-based approaches and the reconceptualization of classical ‘word and paradigm’ (WP) approaches as general models of morphological analysis. WP models are well adapted to the description and analysis of complex morphological patterns, most transparently clear in inflection. Modern WP models demonstrate how morphological organization is fundamentally implicational: the central role of words (and paradigms) reflects their predictive value in a morphological system. Understanding the nature of morphological organization, within and across languages, requires exploration of the fundamental elements of implicational relations. Descriptively this involves identifying the internal structure of words and the ways this structure facilitates an external organization into patterns of relatedness. Theoretically, it is necessary to identify analytic tools appropriate for specifying and quantifying word-internal and word-external organization. This type of analytic approach encourages the investigation of the types of learning theories that may play a role in determining the patterns observed to occur and thereby help to explain their learnability.
Keywords: word, morphological organization, paradigm, gestalt exponence, implicational relations, information theory, conditional entropy, learnability, analogy
James P. Blevins is Reader in Morphology and Syntax in the University of Cambridge. His current research is concerned mainly with the structure and complexity of inflectional systems. These issues are approached from the standpoint of contemporary word and paradigm models, interpreted from a largely information-theoretic and discriminative perspective.
Professor of Linguistics at UC San Diego. He has focused on periphrastic morphosyntax, A Theory of Predicates (with Gert Webelhuth) CSLI/Chicago 1998, and linking theories, Proto-Properties and Grammatical Encoding (with John Moore) CSLI/Chicago 2001. He is exploring Pattern-Theoretic models of grammatical organization from a Developmental Systems perspective, as in Descriptive Typology and Linguistic Theory (with Irina Nikolaeva) CSLI/Chicago 2014, and quantitative approaches to word-based morphology.
Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Asian/Middle Eastern Languages at San Diego State University. His research focus is on compu-tational approaches to morphosyntax, and in particular word-based models of inflection. Prior to joining SDSU in 2002, he was a member of the humanities computing department at the University of Groningen. He has a PhD in linguistics from Stanford University.
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- Oxford Handbooks in Linguistics
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- The Contributors
- Introduction: Theory and Theories in Morphology
- A Short History of Morphological Theory
- Theoretical Issues in Word Formation
- Theoretical Issues in Inflection
- Structuralism
- Early Generative Grammar
- Later Generative Grammar and Beyond: Lexicalism
- Distributed Morphology
- Minimalism in Morphological Theories
- Optimality Theory and Prosodic Morphology
- Morphology in Lexical-Functional Grammar and Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar
- Natural Morphology
- Word and Paradigm Morphology
- Paradigm Function Morphology
- Network Morphology
- Word Grammar Morphology
- Morphology in Cognitive Grammar
- Construction Morphology
- Relational Morphology in the Parallel Architecture
- Canonical Typology
- Morphological Theory and Typology
- Morphological Theory and Creole Languages
- Morphological Theory and Diachronic Change
- Morphological Theory and Synchronic Variation
- Morphological Theory and First Language Acquisition
- Morphological Theory and Second Language Acquisition
- Morphological Theory and Psycholinguistics
- Morphological Theory and Neurolinguistics
- Morphological Theory and Computational Linguistics
- Morphological Theory and Sign Languages
- References
- Language Index
- Index of Names
- General Index
- Oxford Handbooks in Linguistics