What is Morphology?, 3rd Edition

Preface

This little book is meant to introduce fundamental aspects of morphology to students with only a minimal background in linguistics. It presupposes only the very basic knowledge of phonetics, phonology, syntax, and semantics that an introductory course in linguistics provides. If, having worked through this book, a student has some understanding of the range of basic issues in morphological description and analysis; can appreciate what a good morphological description looks like, how a good morphological analysis works and what a good theory of morphology does; can actually do morphological analysis at an intermediate level; and most importantly understands that linguistic morphology can be rewarding; then the basic goal of the book will have been met. In this edition, we have included a new chapter on computational morphology written by Kyle Gorman. This chapter is more technical than the other chapters of the book due to the subject matter and may therefore require closer reading and a slower, more guided approach on the part of the instructor. But we believe that the growing importance of experimental and computational methods in morphology make the required effort well worth it, and we are grateful to Kyle for his contribution.

The book departs from a trend common among current linguistics textbooks, even at the elementary level, which tend to be quite theoretical in orientation and even devoted to a single theory or set of related theories. We have chosen instead ...