2015 Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain

University College London, 15-18 September 2015

Workshop on Morphological Complexity

Friday 18 September 2015

This workshop will be held in conjunction with Rachel Nordlinger's Linguistics Association Lecture at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain 2015. The organisers are Peter Ackema (Edinburgh) and Rachel Nordlinger (Melbourne).

Plenary speaker

• Rachel Nordlinger (University of Melbourne) - 'Mapping morphological complexity across the Daly River languages of northern Australia'

Invited speakers

• Matthew Baerman and Greville G. Corbett (Surrey) - 'The internal and external typology of paradigms'
• Jochen Trommer (Leipzig) - 'Weight vs. weight, tone vs. tone: Affix blocking in featural affixation systems'
• Irina Nikolaeva (SOAS) - 'The focus feature in Tundra Nenets morphology and syntax' 
• Marianne Mithun (UC Santa Barbara) - 'The flow and ebb of morphological complexity and what it might tell us'

Background

Morphological complexity, and linguistic complexity in general, has received significant attention in the literature over the last few years (e.g. Ackerman and Malouf 2013, Baerman, Brown and Corbett 2015, Dahl 2004, Dressler 2011, Kusters 2003, Miestamo, Sinnemäki and Karlsson 2008, Stump and Finkel 2013), yet the field is yet to reach a consensus on what contitutes morphological complexity, how it can be measured, and what implications it has for other parts of the linguistic system. For some researchers morphology, by its very existence, is complex (Carstairs-McCarthy 2010, Anderson 2015). For many, complexity is not a unitary pehnomenon but must be distinguished into different types and sub-types (e.g. relative vs absolute (Dahl 2004, Miestamo 2008, Kusters 2008)), but there is still no agreement on what these types and sub-types should be. It is clear that some languages have more complex morphological systems than others, but what is the nature of this complexity, what forms can it take, and how can we compare and contrast complexity across different languages?

In this workshop, we aim to address morphological complexity from a number of different perspec- tives – descriptive, typological and theoretical – addressing questions such as:

• what is (and what is not) morphological complexity?
  
• what are the limits of morphological complexity?
  
• how does such complexity interact with other parts of the linguistic system?
  

• what implications does such morphological complexity have for theoretical approaches to morphosyntax?
  

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