Explore
The Typological Diversity of Morphomes
Borja Herce
2023
0 Ungluers have
Faved this Work
Login to Fave
This book constitutes the first typologically oriented monograph on morphomes, which is the term given to systematic morphological identities, usually within inflectional paradigms, that do not map onto syntactic or semantic natural classes like ‘plural’, ‘past’, ‘third-person singular’. Its first half addresses the theoretical and empirical challenges surrounding the identification and definition of morphomes, and surveys their links with related notions like syncretism, homophony, blocking, segmentation, economy, morphophonology, etc. It also presents the different ways in which morphomic structures have been observed to emerge, change, and disappear from a language. The second part of the book contains its core contribution: a database with 120 morphomes across 79 languages from all around the world. These structures are first presented in painstaking philological detail, and then deconstructed into logically independent axes of variation, identified in the spirit of Multivariate Typology. Statistical analysis is then undertaken to spot trends and correlations which are subsequently discussed. Various findings, relevant to both proponents and detractors of Autonomous Morphology, have emerged regarding, for example, the idiosyncratic (i.e. not representative) nature of Romance morphomes, the existence of cross-linguistically recurrent unnatural patterns, and the preference for more natural structures even among morphomes. The database is also expected to allow explorations of other issues, such as how learnability and communicative efficiency pressures impact morphological structure, and lexical and grammatical informativity across the word.
This book is included in DOAB.
Why read this book? Have your say.
You must be logged in to comment.
Rights Information
Are you the author or publisher of this work? If so, you can claim it as yours by registering as an Unglue.it rights holder.Downloads
This work has been downloaded 72 times via unglue.it ebook links.
- 72 - pdf (CC BY-NC-ND) at Unglue.it.
Keywords
- Database
- Diachrony
- Grammar, syntax & morphology
- Historical & comparative linguistics
- Language
- Linguistics
- Morphology
- morphome
- multivariate
- paradigm
- thema EDItEUR::C Language and Linguistics::CF Linguistics::CFF Historical and comparative linguistics
- thema EDItEUR::C Language and Linguistics::CF Linguistics::CFK Grammar, syntax and morphology
- typology
- unnatural
Links
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192864598.001.0001Editions