This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.This is the first typologically-oriented book-length treatment of morphomes, systematic morphological identities, usually within inflectional paradigms, that do not map onto syntactic or semantic natural classes. In the first half of the book, Borja Herce outlines the theoretical and empirical challenges associated with the identification and definition of morphomes, and surveys their links with related notions such as syncretism, homophony, segmentation, and economy, among others. He alsopresents the different ways in which morphomic structures in a language have been observed to emerge, change, and disappear. The second part of the book contains its core contribution: a database of 120 morphomes across 79 languages from a range of families, which are presented and analysed in detail. Arange of findings emerge as a result, including the idiosyncratic nature of morphomes in the Romance languages, the existence of cross-linguistically recurrent unnatural patterns, and the preference for more natural structures even among morphomes. The database also allows further explorations of other issues such as the effect of learnability and communicative efficiency on morphological structures, and the lexical and grammatical informativity of morphs and their distribution.

Ideal in introductory courses dealing with grammatical structure and linguistic analysis, Introduction to Typology overviews the major grammatical categories and constructions in the world's languages. Framed in a typological perspective, the constant concern of this primary text is to underscore the similarities and differences which underlie the vast array of human languages.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This is the first typologically-oriented book-length treatment of morphomes, systematic morphological identities, usually within inflectional paradigms, that do not map onto syntactic or semantic natural classes. In the first half of the book, Borja Herce outlines the theoretical and empirical challenges associated with the identification and definition of morphomes, and surveys their links with related notions such as syncretism, homophony, segmentation, and economy, among others. He also presents the different ways in which morphomic structures in a language have been observed to emerge, change, and disappear. The second part of the book contains its core contribution: a database of 120 morphomes across 79 languages from a range of families, which are presented and analysed in detail. A range of findings emerge as a result, including the idiosyncratic nature of morphomes in the Romance languages, the existence of cross-linguistically recurrent unnatural patterns, and the preference for more natural structures even among morphomes. The database also allows further explorations of other issues such as the effect of learnability and communicative efficiency on morphological structures, and the lexical and grammatical informativity of morphs and their distribution.

This volume surveys the current debate on the morphome, bringing together experts from different linguistic fields--morphology, phonology, semantics, typology, historical linguistics--and from different theoretical backgrounds, including both proponents and critics of autonomous morphology. The concept of the morphome is one of the most influential but contentious ideas in contemporary morphology. The term is typically used to denote a pattern of exponence lacking phonological, syntactic, or semantic motivation, and putative examples of morphomicity are frequently put forward as evidence for the existence of a purely morphological level of linguistic representation. Central to the volume is the need to attain a deeper understanding of morphomic patterns, developing stringent diagnostics of their existence, exploring the formal grammatical devices required to characterize them adequately, and assessing their implications for language acquisition and change. The extensive empirical evidence is drawn from a wide range of languages, including Archi, German, Kayardild, Latin and its descendants, Russian, Sanskrit, Selkup, Ulwa, and American Sign Language. As the first book to examine morphomic patterns from such a diverse range of perspectives and on such a broad cross-linguistic basis, The Morphome Debate will be of interest to researchers of all theoretical persuasions in morphology and related linguistic disciplines.

This radically new approach to morphological typology is designed to engage graduate students and academic researchers.

Bringing together a team of well-known scholars, this book examines the link between linguistic cognition and morphological diversity.

This volume explores the multiple aspects of morphological complexity, offering typological, acquisitional, sociolinguistic, and diachronic perspectives. The analyses are based on rich empirical data from a wide range of languages, as well as experimental data from artificial language learning.