Vocabulary Development: A Morphological Analysis (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development)

Vocabulary Development: A Morphological Analysis (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development)

This monograph studies research conducted for the purpose of investigating the relationship between vocabulary recognition and morphological knowledge during the early and middle elementary school years. The findings suggest that lexical development can be characterized in terms of increasing morphological complexity, and as a child ages, the proportion of known complex words that the child figured out by analyzing their morphological structure increased.

This monograph studies research conducted for the purpose of investigating the growth of recognition vocabulary during the early and middle elementary school years in relation to the development of morphological knowledge. The children were tested on a selection of main entry words from a recent unabridged nonhistorical dictionary by means of definition, sentence, and multiple-choice questions. The focus of the present study, however, was on the contribution made by different morphologically defined word types and by knowledge of morphology and word formation to total recognition vocabulary at different age and grade levels. The findings suggest that lexical development can be characterized in terms of increasing morphological complexity. Further, it was found that the proportion of known complex words for which there was evidence that children figured them out by analyzing their morphological structure increased with age and grade.

Morphological Productivity: Structural Constraints in English Derivation (Topics in English Linguistics, 28)

Morphological Productivity: Structural Constraints in English Derivation (Topics in English Linguistics, 28)

On the basis of a survey of a wide range of English derivational affixes it is proposed that the productivity and combinability of a given affix are primarily the result of its individual structural, i.e., phonological, morphological and semantic, properties and not due to more general mechanisms of the various kinds proposed, for example, by proponents of Lexical Phonology/Morphology.

This point is further developed in an in-depth structural analysis of the rival verbal affixes -ize, -ate, -ify, en-, em-, be-, -en and conversion. First, the productivity of these processes is assessed, using both text-based and dictionary-based measures (Cobuild corpus vs. Oxford English Dictionary). Implementing Optimality Theory and Jackendoff’s Lexical Conceptual Semantics, a large number of 20th century neologisms extracted from the OED are investigated with regard to their phonological, morphological and semantic characteristics. Bridging the gap between broad empirical coverage and significant theoretical insights, the analysis leads to new findings concerning both the structural properties of derived verbs in English and the role of these properties in restricting productivity. It is argued that the choice of a particular affix can be largely predicted on the basis of the affix’s individual properties, without any additional machinery besides token-blocking and local analogy. On the theoretical level the proposed analysis presents evidence against the separation of meaning and form in derivational morphology and for a sign-based, output-oriented model instead.

What is Morphology (Fundamentals of Linguistics)

Review
"Aronoff and Fudeman have provided an extremely pleasant tour of the issues in modern morphological theory for beginning students. The rich collection of exercises will be a godsend to instructors and students alike, and the thread of discussion of a single language throughout the book is a brilliant stroke that other texts should emulate."
Stephen R. Anderson, Yale University

"This unusual book combines a basic start on morphology with an introduction to Kujamaat Jóola. It is a fine addition to teaching materials on morphology: a book for beginners to use with a teacher, yet one from which any linguist could learn. The authors intend students to develop ‘a lasting taste for morphology’. I think many will."

Greville Corbett, University of Surrey, Guildford

"Morphology has its own organizing principles, distinct from those of syntax, phonology, and the lexicon. Too many morphology textbooks obscure this fascinating fact, but Aronoff and Fudeman refreshingly make it the cornerstone of their exposition."

Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, University of Canterbury

The Handbook of Morphology (Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics)

"This impressive volume is the first handbook of morphology. It's pioneering status is confirmed by an unprecedented range of topics, not to be found in any existing monograph in the domain of morphology ... I do not know any other book which offers such easy access to all the basics of modern morphology and to such a wide variety of topics." W.U. Dressler, University of Vienna

"Strongly theoretic, the handbook is none the less pleasingly rich in carefully explored data, and fits in well with the other volumes in the series of Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics" Forum for Modern Language Skills, Vol 39, 2003

Review : By verafides "Lazy Eye
You know why nobody has ever reviewed this book on Amazon? Because shoppers interested in a gigantic collection of academic papers on morphological theory are already AWARE of what it is, and don't need to be told about it. And anyone else will never, in fact, look at this review. So it's entirely a bizarre anachronism - a review that nobody will read, that has nothing useful to say.

This is, of course, a wonderful compilation of papers on morphology. It's chocked full of data (and yes, Mr. Zwicky, I'm consciously using 'chocked'), and tons of careful analysis. Most of the papers are theory-neutral, or nearly theory-neutral, and thus it is actually a nice general reference piece, since it won't become outdated. I think this was the general goal that the editors were shooting for, and they met it fabulously. When I want to know how different languages do something, for example Noun Incorporation, I can open up this book and have piles of lovely examples with intelligent commentary. Morphology being the mess that it is, there's not as much really clear organization as I'd like (lots of "Some languages do this, but others kind of do that, and then there's this thing - that we don't know WHAT...to do with") - but that's more to do with the state of morphology than the state of this book. The syntax, phonology, and semantics books in this series are all beautifully organized, and, paradoxically, much more apt to go out of date.

But you probably already know this. If you didn't, you wouldn't be looking at this book - you'd be off digging up a used copy of "M is for Mush-For-Brains" by Sue Grafton-Higgins Clark. And then you wouldn't have any clue what I'm talking about, and probably too busy being led astray by William Safire or Richard Lederer to bother trying to find out.

This is only one book in the series - it is a behemoth, though, so get a cupcake for the mailman when he delivers it to you.

Morphological Structure

The domain of morphology is words. How words are formed is the concern of this field so morphological structure is the structure which consists of the elements to form words. The most common word formation in language including English is affixation. Affixation is the process of word formation by adding the affixes or bound morphemes in bases or roots (free morphemes). In other words morphological structure is the structure or forms of words primarily through the use of morpheme construct (Crystal, 1980: 232). Morpheme is defined as the smallest meaningful unit of language (Lim Kiat Boey, 1975 : 37). Morphemes can be divided into two namely free morphemes and bound morphemes. Morphemes are the components which build words. The word singers, for example, consists of three meaningful units or morphemes, sing, –er, and –s. The morpheme sing which forms the word singers has the lexical meaning; the morpheme –er means the doer of singing; the morpheme –s has plural meaning. We can identify the meaning of the morpheme sing although it stands alone but we cannot identify the meaning of morphemes –er and –s in isolation. We can identify the meaning of the morpheme –er and –s after they combine to the morpheme sing. Sing which can meaningfully stand alone is called free morpheme while the morphemes such as –er and –s, which cannot meaningfully stand alone are called bound morphemes. Bound morphemes must be attached to free morphemes. Bound morphemes are also called affixes which can be classified into prefix, infix, and suffix. English only has two kinds of bound morphemes namely prefixes and suffixes. No infixes exist in English. Bound morphemes are classified into two types namely derivational and inflectional morphemes. Both inflectional and derivational morphemes play an important role in the larger structure namely syntactic structure.