Description
In this radically new approach to morphological typology, the authors set out new and explicit methods for the typological classification of languages. Drawing on evidence from a diverse range of languages including Chinantec, Dakota, French, Fur, Icelandic, Ngiti and Sanskrit, the authors propose innovative ways of measuring inflectional complexity. Designed to engage graduate students and academic researchers, the book presents opportunities for further investigation. The authors' data sets and the computational tool that they constructed for their analysis are available online, allowing readers to employ them in their own research. Readers can access the online computational tool through www.cambridge.org/stump_finkel.
Table of Contents
1. Principal parts; 2. Plats; 3. A typology of principal-part systems; 4. Inflection-class transparency; 5. Grammatically enhanced plats; 6. Impostors and heteroclites; 7. Stems as principal parts; 8. The marginal detraction hypothesis; 9. Inflection classes, implicative relations and morphological theory; 10. Entropy, predictability and predictiveness; 11. The complexity of inflection-class systems; 12. Sensitivity to plat presentation; 13. The Principal-Parts Analyzer.
