Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 26 January 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter deals with morphological variation in synchronic terms. Variation is treated as a phenomenon triggered by principally language-internal causes, although it may often result from the interference of language external factors, such as contact with another language. Arguments are drawn from derivation, compounding, and inflection, and components such as reduction of allomorphy, paradigmatic leveling, selectional properties, headedness, and generally innate features of word-formation, proper to a particular language, are shown to be behind variation. Illustration is provided with examples from mainly Modern Greek, a fusional language which is rich in morphological structures and displays variation in the entire range of morphological processes. It is proposed that the examination of varying forms sheds light on the primacy of certain linguistic tendencies in a specific language and can give hints on possible linguistic changes.

Keywords: Compounding, Derivation, Headedness, Heteroclisis, Inflection, language contact, paradigmatic leveling

Angela Ralli

Angela Ralli is Professor of General Linguistics and Chair of the Department of Philology at the University of Patras (Greece). She has studied Linguistics at the University of Montreal (BA, MA, PhD), speaks fluently four languages (Greek, English, French, and Italian), and is interested in morphology and dialectal morphological variation. She has several publications on morphology (compounding, derivation, and inflection), and is a permanent member on the scientific board of the European Network for Linguistic Morphology, and the Mediterranean Morphology Meeting.

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.