This book characterises the diverse morphological complexity we find in the languages of the world. Richly illustrated, examples are drawn from dozens of different languages and are subjected to rigorous quantitative analysis. It will be ideal reading for academic researchers and graduate students of linguistics, with a special interest in morphology and English language.
This volume brings together a collection of original articles investigating state-of-the-art themes in morphology. The papers in the volume provide an in-depth analysis for spoken and sign languages within morphological word domain, morphosyntax and morphophonology. Bringing data from a variety of languages including Turkish, some understudied ones (e.g. Turkish Sign Language, Late Ottoman Turkish) and also endangered languages (e.g. Karachay-Balkar, Sauzini, Cappadocian, Aivaliot and Pharasiot Greek), the volume will be of special interest to a wide audience ranging from typologists to theoretical linguists and graduate students in linguistics and is expected to generate further research on the above mentioned languages, as well as to contribute to the cross-linguistic literature on the themes explored in the volume.
This volume explores the multiple aspects of morphological complexity, investigating primarily whether certain aspects of morphology can be considered more complex than others, and how that complexity can be measured. The book opens with a detailed introduction from the editors that critically assesses the foundational assumptions that inform contemporary approaches to morphological complexity. In the chapters that follow, the volume's expert contributors approach the topic from typological, acquisitional, sociolinguistic, and diachronic perspectives; the concluding chapter offers an overview of these various approaches, with a focus on the minimum description length principle. The analyses are based on rich empirical data from both well-known languages such as Russian and lesser-studied languages from Africa, Australia, and the Americas, as well as experimental data from artificial language learning.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Systems and Frameworks for Computational Morphology, SFCM 2011, held in Zurich, Switzerland in August 2011. The eight revised full papers presented together with one invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 13 submissions. The papers address various topics in computational morphology and the relevance of morphology to computational linguistics more broadly.
This collective volume breaks new ground in studies of linguistic complexity by addressing this phenomenon in heritage languages. It dismisses with the conception that heritage languages are less complex than their baseline or homeland counterparts and shows complexity trade-offs at various levels of linguistic representation. The authors consider defining properties of complexity as a phenomenon, diagnostics of complexity, and the ways complexity is modeled, measured, or operationalized in language sciences. The chapters showcase several bilingual dyads and offer new empirical data on heritage language production and use.
This volume contains new research on the lexicon and its relation to other aspects of linguistics. These essays put forth empirical arguments to claim that specific theoretical assumptions concerning the lexicon play a crucial role in resolving problems pertaining to other components of grammar. Topics include: syntactic/semantic interface in the areas of aspect, argument structure, and thematic roles; lexicon-based accounts of quirky case, anaphora, and control; the boundary between the lexicon and syntax in the domains of sentence comprehension and nominal compounding; and the possibility of extending the concept of blocking beyond the traditional lexicon. Ivan Sag is a professor of linguistics at Stanford University. Anna Szabolcsi is an associate professor of linglustics at UCLA.
MATHEMATICAL MACROEVOLUTION IN DIATOM RESEARCH Buy this book to learn how to use mathematics in macroevolution research and apply mathematics to study complex biological problems. This book contains recent research in mathematical and analytical studies on diatoms. These studies reflect the complex and intricate nature of the problems being analyzed and the need to use mathematics as an aid in finding solutions. Diatoms are important components of marine food webs, the silica and carbon cycles, primary productivity, and carbon sequestration. Their uniqueness as glass-encased unicells and their presence throughout geologic history exemplifies the need to better understand such organisms. Explicating the role of diatoms in the biological world is no more urgent than their role as environmental and climate indicators, and as such, is aided by the mathematical studies in this book. The volume contains twelve original research papers as chapters. Macroevolutionary science topics covered are morphological analysis, morphospace analysis, adaptation, food web dynamics, origination-extinction and diversity, biogeography, life cycle dynamics, complexity, symmetry, and evolvability. Mathematics used in the chapters include stochastic and delay differential and partial differential equations, differential geometry, probability theory, ergodic theory, group theory, knot theory, statistical distributions, chaos theory, and combinatorics. Applied sciences used in the chapters include networks, machine learning, robotics, computer vision, image processing, pattern recognition, and dynamical systems. The volume covers a diverse range of mathematical treatments of topics in diatom research. Audience Diatom researchers, mathematical biologists, evolutionary and macroevolutionary biologists, paleontologists, paleobiologists, theoretical biologists, as well as researchers in applied mathematics, algorithm sciences, complex systems science, computational sciences, informatics, computer vision and image processing sciences, nanoscience, the biofuels industry, and applied engineering.
The many facets of grammatical gender remain one of the most fruitful areas of linguistic research, and pose fascinating questions about the origins and development of complexity in language. The present work is a two-volume collection of 13 chapters on the topic of grammatical gender seen through the prism of linguistic complexity. The contributions discuss what counts as complex and/or simple in grammatical gender systems, whether the distribution of gender systems across the world’s languages relates to the language ecology and social history of speech communities. Contributors demonstrate how the complexity of gender systems can be studied synchronically, both in individual languages and over large cross-linguistic samples, and diachronically, by exploring how gender systems change over time. In addition to three chapters on the theoretical foundations of gender complexity, volume one contains six chapters on grammatical gender and complexity in individual languages and language families of Africa, New Guinea, and South Asia. This volume is complemented by volume two, which consists of three chapters providing diachronic and typological case studies, followed by a final chapter discussing old and new theoretical and empirical challenges in the study of the dynamics of gender complexity.
Some structural features of languages predict others, some remain unchanged in daughter languages, others have an areal consistency; in establishing typologically, historically and geographically stable features in the worlds languages, examples are included from Kayardild, Djingili, Dyirbal, Mangarayi, Maung, Ngiyambaa.
