Morphology

What are words? Is there evidence for them having internal structure? What is the relationship between what can intuitively be understood as “forms of the same word”? Is there a distinct word-building module of the grammar, or do words simply arise from the interaction of the syntax and phonology? These are the kinds of big-picture questions that morphologists ask. This course offers an in-depth introduction to the field of linguistic morphology, which investigates the form of “words”—whatever those are. We will investigate a number of morphological phenomena in a diverse sample of languages (e.g. allomorphy, suppletion, syncretism, inflection and derivation, morphomes, paradigmatic structure, lexicalism, bracketing paradoxes, the relationship between morphology and syntax/phonology, *ABA phenomena, etc.), culminating with an introduction to Distributed Morphology, a current and highly-influential theory of morphology and the architecture of the grammar.