122222 SE Linguistics Seminar / BA Paper / MA historical & descriptive linguistics (2012W)

The seminar will focus on the theory of Natural Morphology (henceforth NM) but if students prefer another framework, they can use it in their papers, provided that they justify briefly why they prefer it to NM and compare both frameworks in some of their argumentations. NM has been developed since the 1970s inspired by the Theory of Natural Phonology and by the introduction of semiotics into morphological theory by Roman Jakobson. This is a preference theory which explains what is marked vs. unmarked or more vs. less natural in grammar and uses systematically so-called external evidence from diachrony, language acquisition, psycholinguistic experiments, language impairments, poetic language use, etc. The theory has been much used for German, Latin and Romance languages, Ancient and Modern Greek, Russian, Turkish, Arabic, etc., but much less for English. In this course, the theory with its 3 subtheories (of universal preferences, such as iconicity, transparency, of typological adequacy, and of language-specific system adequacy will be presented. The students’ seminar papers will be on the synchronic morphology (inflection, derivational morphology, compounding, clitics, morphonology) of English, be it on the realisation of some universal preference parameter(s) in a part of English morphology, the typological characterisation of English morphological phenomena, morphological productivity (including analogy and family size).
Other proposed topics: grammatical vs. extragrammatical morphology (e.g. reduplications), phenomena of first and second language acquisition of, diachronic changes in, morphology, morphological phenomena in poetic language and advertisements, development of pidgins, possibly also morphology in English as lingua franca.