Complexities of Morphology

This volume explores the multiple aspects of morphological complexity, investigating primarily whether certain aspects of morphology can be considered more complex than others, and how that complexity can be measured. The book opens with a detailed introduction from the editors that critically assesses the foundational assumptions that inform contemporary approaches to morphological complexity. In the chapters that follow, the volume's expert contributors approachthe topic from typological, acquisitional, sociolinguistic, and diachronic perspectives; the concluding chapter offers an overview of these various approaches, with a focus on the minimum description length principle. The analyses are based on rich empirical data from both well-known languages such asRussian and lesser-studied languages from Africa, Australia, and the Americas, as well as experimental data from artificial language learning.

Peter Arkadiev is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Assistant Professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities. His research interests include language typology and areal linguistics, morphology, case and alignment systems, tense and aspect, and Baltic and Northwest Caucasian languages. He is the co-editor of Contemporary Approaches to Baltic Linguistics (with Axel Holvoet and BjörnWiemer) and Borrowed Morphology (with Francesco Gardani and Nino Amiridze), both published by De Gruyter in 2015Francesco Gardani is Professor of Romance Linguistics at the University of Zürich. He is co-Editor-in-Chief of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Romance Linguistics.