122229 SE Linguistics Seminar / BA Paper / MA historical & descriptive linguistics / MA applied linguistics (2011W)

English morphology: synchronic and diachronic

Morphology studies the structure of words. It has two domains, viz. word-forms (= inflection) and the formation of new lexical items (= word-formation), whose delimitation is not quite clear-cut. English morphology has changed considerably in the course of its history in both domains, loosing elements in inflection and gaining elements in word-formation (borrowing).
The seminar will first be concerned with some basic theoretical questions, such as the definition of the morpheme (the basic unit of morphology), the problem of morpheme- vs word-based morphology, the handling of allomorphy (morpheme variation) in various frameworks. It will then turn to certain more specific aspects of Modern English morphology, e.g. the source of irregular verbs and nouns, a synchronic coherent description of verbal and nominal inflectional morphology, compounding, prefixation, suffixation, the delimitation of native and non-native word-formation. Other topics will deal with the history of English noun morphology and the typological shift involved, the history of verb morphology, the history of verb compounds of the type to babysit, to proofread, the role of zero in morphology, and the history of personal pronouns.

Suggested introductory reading:

Bauer, Laurie
1983 English word-formation. (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bauer, Laurie
1992 Introducing linguistic morphology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Plag, Ingo
2003 Word-formation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Further material (Kastovsky, lecture notes) will be made available after the first meeting.