160178 PS Morphologische Analyse (2024S)

This course serves as a Master-level "Field Methods lite," where students are introduced to the analysis of raw linguistic data. Differing from a traditional field methods course, this course:
- focuses on morphological analysis of word forms
- explores a broad spectrum of languages, with a geographical focus on languages of the Americas
- encapsulates major concepts in linguistic typology on the analysis of complex verb forms

The course aims to equip students with two principal areas of knowledge and expertise:

1. Morphosyntactic Typology: This aims to offer a thorough insight into what the "median human language" looks like, familiarizing students with the typological range of different sets of morphosyntactic features expressed on the main verb in the clause.
- A set of fundamental concepts around argument structure, transitivity and valency: notably morphosyntactic transitivity, ergativity, person marking ("argument indexing"), and valency-changing operations.
- Well-known topics such as tense-aspect-mood (TAM), polarity, etc., which, despite being conceptually familiar to all, still present significant challenges in morphological analysis.

2. Theory and Practice of Morphological Analysis: This focuses on cultivating a deep and grounded understanding of how to analyze complex morphological structures, and fostering a sense of analytical elegance and parsimony ("The Occam's Razor").
- Revisiting the basics:
- identifying stem and affix variations
- analysis of surface "post-lexical" phonology and simple allomorphy
- determining morpheme order
- Analytical skills for recurrent non-canonical morphological patterns, including:
- inflectional classes
- fusional complexity at the stem level in a word-and-paradigm analysis
- root classes and stem formants

By focusing on verb forms across a diverse linguistic landscape, this course aims to deepen students' understanding of human language's core mechanisms and prepare them for practical work on raw linguistic data.