The rise of complexity in inflectional morphology

• Authors: Wolfgang U. Dressler
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This contribution is meant to deal, among the papers devoted to complexity in naturalness theory, with the rise of inflectional complexity in first language acquisition and in diachronic change. These two sections are preceded by an introduction devoted to the conceptualisation of inflectional complexity within the theory of Natural Morphology and to explicating factors of morphological complexity. The focus will be on unproductive patterns in acquisition after the child’s detection of morphological (de)composition. Additional topics will be the role of the naturalness parameters of transparency, iconicity, (bi)uniqueness, and of figure and ground. Main topics of the third section on diachrony will be distributed exponence and the control of three classical claims on diachronic change by Natural Morphology in studying changes from Latin to Romance languages.

Keywords

EN

complexity; inflectional morphology; acquisition of morphology; diachronic morphology; Natural morphology

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Journal: Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics
• Year: 2011
• Volume: 47
• Pages: 159

Dates

published

2011

received

2010-12-15

revised

2011-03-15

accepted

2011-03-16

online

2011-06-14

Contributors

author

Wolfgang U. Dressler

• Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/psicl-2011-0013