This course is intended to provide an introduction to the principal descriptive and theoretical questions in morphology. The module examines the main phenomena of morphology: basic notions such as the lexeme, inflection/derivation, paradigms and their structure; types of word structure in the world's languages, affixation, linear order of affixes, types of exponence; patterns of derivation; argument structure alternations; morphological operations: concatenative vs non-concatenative morphology, compounding, etc; types of word: morphological word, phonological word, syntactic word, complex predicates; and a review of competing models and approaches to concatenative and non-concatenative morphology; and stem/word-based models of inflection vs. morpheme-based ones.
By the end of the module the student should be able to:
* analyse morphological phenomena in a variety of languages, identifying the most important alternations and processes;
* understand the main conceptual problems in the study of word structure;
* understand the differences between what is prototypical as opposed to what is canonical when it comes to the categorization of morphological phenomena or items;
* be in position to distinguish between various approaches, and the stance they take when accounting for seemingly the same morphological phenomenon, such as non-concatenative morphology, or paradigmatically-related forms.
By the end of the module the student should be able to:
* analyse morphological phenomena in a variety of languages, identifying the most important alternations and processes;
* understand the main conceptual problems in the study of word structure;
* understand the differences between what is prototypical as opposed to what is canonical when it comes to the categorization of morphological phenomena or items;
* be in position to distinguish between various approaches, and the stance they take when accounting for seemingly the same morphological phenomenon, such as non-concatenative morphology, or paradigmatically-related forms.