Lexeme-Morpheme Base Morphology

A General Theory of Inflection and Word Formation

By Robert Beard

Subjects: Linguistics
Series: SUNY series in Linguistics
Paperback : 9780791424728, 433 pages, July 1995
Hardcover : 9780791424711, 433 pages, July 1995

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Table of contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

List of Figures

List of Tables

List of Symbols

1. The Agenda of Morphology

2. The Aristotelean Hypothesis

3. An Outline of Lexeme-Morpheme Base Morphology

4. The Empty Morpheme Entailment

5. Nominal Inflectional Categories

6. Verbal Inflectional Categories

7. Types of Lexical Derivation

8. Transposition

9. Grammatical and Semantic Functions

10. The Syntax and Morphology of Adpositions

11. Case, Case Marking, and Paradigms

12. The Defective Adjective Hypothesis

13. The Unitary Grammatical Function Hypothesis

14. The Base Rule Theory

15. Bound and Free Grammatical Morphemes

16. LMBM and the Agenda of Morphology

Appendix A
The Universal Set of Nominal Grammatical Functions

Appendix B
Productive Yupik Denominal Verbalizations

Appendix C
Chukchee Denominal Verbalizations

Bibliography

Author Index

Language Index

Subject Index

This is the first complete theory of the morphology of language, a compendium of information on morphological categories and operations.

Description

This book is the first complete theory of the morphology of language. It describes both inflection and lexical word formation, their relation to syntax, phonology, and semantics, and to each other. It enumerates most of the morphological categories of the world's languages, describing their recombinant abilities, and how they are realized in inflectional and lexical derivations.

Robert Beard is the Director of the Linguistics Program at Bucknell University.

Reviews

"Beard tackles an important but long neglected issue in morphological theory: whether there are any general linguistic constraints on the meaning which morphological processes (whether derivational or inflectional) can express, and if so, what the relationship is between possible derivational and possible inflectional meanings. He offers precise answers to these questions, arguing for strong constraints. He also offers an account of the relationship between form and content in affixal morphology from which it emerges as quite natural that there should be widespread mismatches, in contrast to the corresponding relationship for lexical stems." -- Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, University of Canterbury, New Zealand