WHAT IS MORPHOLOGY?

Extract

What is Morphology? Mark Aronoff and Kirsten Fudeman. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Pp. xvii + 257. $29.95 paper.

This text introduces its readers to a wide range of morphological properties in multiple languages, including Standard American English and a number of typologically different languages (including Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Ancient Greek, Larike, and Jujamaat Joola). Each chapter is accompanied by examples in addition to morphological problems and exercises that contain data from multiple languages. Chapter 1 provides basic definitions of terminologies in morphology. Chapter 2 examines multiple types and definitions of words and lexemes and the effects of stress and affixation in different languages. Chapter 3 investigates the morphophonemic properties (including allomorphs, reduplication, and vowel harmony) of languages. Chapter 4 discusses different aspects of derivational morphology (including compounding, zero-derivation, and affixation), whereas chapter 6 explores the semantics involved in derivational morphology in different languages. Chapter 7 analyzes different kinds of inflectional morphology, with a focus on how it is different from derivational morphology across languages. Both universal and language-specific morphosyntactic processes in different languages are examined in this chapter, and chapter 8 investigates issues of morphological productivity with emphasis on different constraints on morphological processes observed in different languages.