The Grammar of Words: An Introduction to Linguistic Morphology (Oxford Textbooks in Linguistics) Book

This text provides an up-to-date introduction to the morphological analysis of words. Morphology deals with the internal structure of words and how this structure affects their phonological, syntactic and semantic properties. This book covers both inflection (the different forms of a word), and word formation, the ways in which new words can be added to the vocabulary of a language. The enormous variety of morphological operations that we find in natural languages is quite intriguing. The first part of the book gives a cross-linguistic survey of these operations: affixation, compounding, reduplication, and several kinds of phonological operation. The specific properties of word formation and inflection are dealt with in subsequent chapters. The second part of the book focuses on the ways in which the morphological structure of words determines their phonological, syntactic, and semantic properties. These different 'interfaces' are dealt with systematically, again with illustrations from a number of languages. In the last part of the book the reader is introduced to present-day research on the acquisition of morphological knowledge, and on the way in which complex words are processed. This will give insight as to how lexical knowledge is structured and how it is stored in memory.Read More