TOPICS IN MORPHOLOGY - THE STRUCTURE OF WORDS

1. Morphology: The study of Word Structure – Overview

Definitions, basic concepts. Morphology in Grammar. Transparency vs. opacity. Productivity vs. lexicalization. Morphological classification of languages.

2. Words vs. Morphemes

The minimal meaningful units of language. Identifying free and bound forms. Types of morphemes and allomorphs. Roots, stems and affixes.

3. The linguistic mental lexicon

Storage of morphological information. Morphological features. Lexical entries. Lexical redundancy rules.

4. Word Structure.

Word-formation processes, inflection, derivation, compounding. Other ways to derive words. The strata theory.

5. Information Processing on Word Structures.

Structural principles, headedness. Feature-inheritance principles. The domain of morphology. Links with Syntax and Phonology.

Reading List

Aronoff, M. and F. Anshen (1998). “Morphology and the Lexicon: Lexicalization and Productivity”. In A. Spencer and A. Zwicky (eds.) The Handbook of Morphology. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 237-248.

Bauer, L. (1983, reprinted in 1996). English Word-Formation (chapter 2). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bauer, L. (1988, reprinted in 1995). Introducing Linguistic Morphology (Part 1, Part 2: 71-104, Part 3: 107-148). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Coates, R. (1999). Word Structure. Language Workbooks. London/New York: Routledge.

Jensen, J.T. (1990). Word Structure in Generative Grammar (chapters 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

O’Grady, W., M. Dobrovolsy and M. Aronoff (1991, 2^nd edition). Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction (chapter 4). New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Ralli, A. (1999a). “Inflectional Features and the Morphological Module Hypothesis”. Working Papers on English and Greek Linguistics. University of Thessaloniki: Dept. of English Studies, pp. 111-141.

Ralli, A. (2002). « Topics in Morphology ». Class Lectures.

Spencer, A. (1991). Morphological Theory (chapters 1,2, 8: 309-319, 11). Oxford: Blackwell.

ANGELA RALLI, Ph.D., is a professor of General Linguistics at the Department of Philology (Linguistics Division) of the University of Patras (Greece).

From 1990 to 1993, she has been Assistant Professor at the Department of French Studies of the University of Athens, and from 1993 to 1997 Associate Professor at the same Department. She has also held a senior research position at the Institute of Natural Language Processing in Athens (1988-1991) and short-term visiting appointments at the University of Amsterdam (1995-96), and the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM) in 1996-97. In 1999, she won the Faculty Enrichment Award, granted by the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for academic achievement.

Angela Ralli completed her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. studies at the Department of Linguistics of the University of Montreal, with a specialization in Generative Morphology, both synchronic and historical (1988). While a graduate student, she won the SSHRC Canadian award for academic excellence.

She is fluent in 4 languages, Greek (native competence), English, Italian, and French, while she has a sufficient working knowledge of German, Spanish and Russian.

Her main research interests focus on morphology and its relationship to syntax and phonology. These include topics such as inflection, compounding, and the domain of morphology in grammar. She has been the principal investigator of a large consortium of researchers working on European compounds, and has directed projects related to issues of dialectology and minority languages, and the development of morphological processors and electronic dictionaries. She also collaborates on several grants on theoretical linguistics, morphology and the mental lexicon (Canadian Research Council), and speech disabilities in early childhood (Cyprus Research Institute of Genetics).

Angela Ralli is in the editorial board of the Journal of Greek Linguistics (John Benjamins) and co-editor of a number of volumes, among which, the Comparative Syntax of Balkan Languages (2001, Oxford University Press). She has published articles in international journals, such as Language and Speech, The Linguistic Review, Rivista di Grammatica Generativa, Yearbook of Morphology, Acta Linguistica Hungarica, and has been a reviewer for several publishing houses.

In addition to research and teaching, Angela Ralli has maintained an active level of professional activities. She has been an elected member of the GLOW (Generative Linguistics in the Old World) Board (1994-1999), and is a permanent member of the scientific committee of the Mediterranean Conference of Morphology. She has also organized the 18th GLOW Colloquium (Athens, 1996), the First Mediterranean Meeting of Morphology (Mytilene, 1997), the Thermi International Summer School in Linguistics (TISSL, 1999), and the First International Conference of Modern Greek Dialects and Linguistic Theory (Patras, 2000).