This course investigates morphology in languages of the world. While morphology has to do with word structure, because of its nature as an interface, it relates to phonology, syntax, semantics, discourse structure, sociolinguistics, and the nature of the linguistic lexicon.
Textbook
The textbook for this course is:
Spencer, Andrew. 1991. Morphological Theory: An Introduction to Word Structure in Generative Grammar. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell
While Spencer's book focuses attention primarily on issues of a theoretical nature, we will in this course be concerned also with investigating morphological data in numerous languages and applying techniques for effective and insightful morphological analysis. We will consider also the important question of how children acquire morphology, and how information regarding morphological structure may be stored.
Course Assumptions, Goals, and Organization
As a means of our investigation we will read the majority of the textbook and a number of other works. Each student is expected to come to class prepared to discuss the material assigned. In addition, we will be analyzing morphological data from a number of languages. Although some problems will be assigned simply to illustrate application of the reading to language data with no written work required, a series of such problems (identified as *problems on the Assignment Sheet) will be handed in for evaluation, with each problem evaluated equally in determining the final grade for the course.