What is Morphology?

Provides a critical introduction to the central ideas and perennial problems of morphology, fully revised and updated in a new edition

What is Morphology? is a concise, student-friendly introduction to the fundamentals of contemporary morphological theory and practice. Requiring only a basic knowledge of linguistics, this popular textbook describes morphological phenomena and their interactions with phonology, syntax, and semantics while familiarizing students with the importance of linguistic morphology as a subject of research. Each chapter contains engaging examples and student-friendly explanations to support the development of the skills necessary to analyze a wealth of classic morphological problems.

The third edition is fully updated to reflect the current state of the field, featuring a new chapter on morphology’s intersections with typology and computational linguistics. Expanded coverage of morphological productivity and processing is supported by additional exercises, examples, and further reading suggestions. Thoroughly revised chapters cover essential topics including morphemes, the lexicon, phonology, inflection, syncretism, and derived lexemes. This accessible textbook:

• Introduces fundamental phenomena with a descriptive theme and minimal theory
• Uses cross-linguistic data to explain and clarify new concepts
• Provides new and revised chapters written by prominent experts in their respective areas
• Includes answers to all exercises via a companion instructor’s website

The latest edition of What is Morphology? remains the ideal textbook for undergraduate and graduate linguistics students, researchers and scholars unfamiliar with linguistic morphology, and professionals involved in industrial applications of linguistics such as speech recognition, natural language understanding, machine translation, text-to-speech, and natural language generation.

MARK ARONOFF is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at Stony Brook University, USA. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and previously served as Editor of Language, the journal of the Linguistic Society of America, and as President of the Linguistic Society of America. For Wiley Blackwell he co-edited The Handbook of Linguistics (2017), now in its second edition, with Janie Rees-Miller.

KIRSTEN FUDEMAN is the author of Vernacular Voices: Language and Identity in Medieval French Jewish Communities (2010).