Network Morphology

Abstract

Morphology is particularly challenging, because it is pervaded by irregularity and idiosyncrasy. This book is a study of word structure using a specific theoretical framework known as 'Network Morphology'. It describes the systems of rules which determine the structure of words by construing irregularity as a matter of degree, using examples from a diverse range of languages and phenomena to illustrate. Many languages share common word building strategies and many diverge in interesting ways. These strategies can be understood by distinguishing different notions of 'default'. The Network Morphology philosophy promotes the use of computational implementation to check theories. The accompanying website provides the computer coded version of the Network Morphology model of word structure for readers to test, customize and develop. This book will be a valuable contribution to the fields of linguistic typology and morphology and will be welcomed by researchers and graduate students in these areas.

Inferring inflection classes with description length

“…This is very similar in spirit, if not in the details of execution, to inflection class hierarchies customarily used in Network Morphology (Corbett and Fraser 1993;Brown and Hippisley 2012).…”

“…Of course, a partition of the lexicon into a small set of clusters of lexemes with similar behavior is one among a variety of ways one may approach the structure of an inflectional system; the fact that is has a longstanding tradition as a pedagogical tool is not reason enough not to explore alternative forms of classification. is an initial attempt at inferring from surface patterns lattice-shaped classifications such as those familiar from Network Morphology (Brown and Hippisley 2012) and HPSG approaches to morphology (Bonami and Crysmann 2016).…”

Nominalizing evaluative suffixes in Russian: The interaction of declension class, gender, and animacy

“…The relationships between morphemes are structurally identical to relationships between words. DM contrasts with descriptivist frameworks which view categorization in terms of inflection vs. derivation, but this has been proven problematic with respect to the behaviour of evaluative derivations (Brown and Hippisley 2012, Dressler and Barbaresi 1994, Manova 2004, Scalise 1984, 1988, Stump 1991, Vinogradov 1972. It has been shown in the literature that the behaviour of evaluative derivations is not wholly inflectional or derivational.…”

Overabundance and inflectional classification: Quantitative evidence from Czech

“…Inflectional systems of any complexity exhibit differential inflectional behavior, where lexemes of the same part of speech use different marking strategies to contrast the forms filling cells of their inflectional paradigm. Systems of inflection classes are the tool of choice to explicate such variability, and recent research has highlighted how such systems are organized (Corbett & Fraser 1993;Dressler & Thornton 1996;Brown & Hippisley 2012;Beniamine, Bonami & Sagot 2017;Beniamine 2021) and how they tend to be partially but not fully motivated by other lexical properties (Aronoff 1994;Baayen & Moscoso del Prado Martín 2005;Guzmán Naranjo 2019). Overabundance may interact with 1 Thornton's typology is stated in terms of canonical criteria (Corbett 2007;Brown, Chumakina & Corbett 2013), and focuses on endpoints of the dimensions rather than describing the dimensions directly.…”