This volume focuses on the theoretical and analytical challenges that languages with complex morphologies pose for the theory and typology of word-level prosodic phenomena. The morphological complexity and phonological length that are characteristic of words in these languages make them a particularly fruitful ground for investigating the effects of both phonological and morphological factors in the assignment of prominence. The first three chapters in the volume explore general theoretical issues pertaining to word prominence in synthetic languages, including the issue of 'wordhood' and the empirical, theoretical, and methodological issues with delineating word-level prominence and the higher-level prosodic phenomena in these languages. These are followed by a series of case studies on stress, accent, and tone in a geographically and genetically diverse set of languages with highly synthetic morphologies including languages of the Americas, Europe and Asia, and Australia. The volume adopts an interdisciplinary perspective, combining phonetic, phonological, and morphosyntactic insights. It will be of interest not only to phonologists and morphologists, but to all those interested in the typological and theoretical issues relating to polysynthetic languages.

This book offers a comprehensive account of the phonological structure of modern Turkish within the framework of recent linguistic models. While phenomena at both the segmental and suprasegmental levels are discussed, the emphasis is on the latter, with analysis of phonological processes that extend over a number of different domains. Lower-level prosodic constituents, including syllables, feet, and prosodic words, are incorporated into a general theory alongside higher-level constituents - the phonological phrase and the intonational phrase - on the assumption that phonological structure is hierarchical in nature and that phonological representations consist of more than a single linear sequence of segments. The approach employed here draws on theories of both representation - Prosodic Phonology and Autosegmental Phonology - and computation, in the form of Optimality Theory. An overarching theme that emerges in every chapter is that not only regular but also apparently “exceptional” phonological forms demonstrate a systematic pattern, and that both can be captured by the same grammar. The volume provides a critical synthesis of research in Turkish phonology, as well as offering new analyses and data from a theoretically-oriented perspective.

The phenomena discussed by the authors range from synthetic compounding in English to agreement alternations in Arabic and complementizer agreement in dialects of Dutch. Their exposition combines insights from lexicalism and distributed morphology, and is expressed in terms accessible to scholars and advanced students. - unique exploration of interfaces of morphology with syntax and phonology - wide empirical scope with many new observations - theoretically innovative and important - accessible to students with chapters designed for use in teaching

This is the most comprehensive book to date on word formation in terms of scope of topics, schools and theoretical positions. All contributions were written by the leading scholars in their respective areas.

Drawing on innovative research, the book reveals the wealth and breadth of the study of word-formation, both theoretically and empirically.

This volume examines the concept of 'word' in its many guises and across many languages. 'Word' is a cornerstone for the understanding of any language: it is a pronounceable phonological unit; it has a meaning and a morphological structure and syntactic function; and it exists as a dictionary entry and an orthographic item. Speakers also understand 'word' as a psychological reality: they can talk about the meaning of a word and its suitability in certain social contexts. However, the relationship between the phonological word and grammatical word can be more complex, in that a phonological word can consist of more than one grammatical word, or vice versa. Following an introduction outlining the parameters of variation for phonological word and grammatical word, the chapters in this volume explore how the concept of 'word' can be applied to languages of diverse typological make-up, from the highly synthetic to highly analytic. The data are drawn from languages of Australia and the Pacific (Fijian, Yalaku, Yidiñ), the Americas (Chamacoco, Murui, Jarawara), Asia (Hmong, Japanese, Lao), and Africa (Makary Kotoko), with a final chapter that investigates the properties of 'word' from a cross-linguistic perspective. The volume advances our understanding of what constitutes a word, and will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of typology, linguistic anthropology, phonology, and grammar.

This volume focuses on detailed studies of various aspects of Construction Morphology, and combines theoretical analysis and descriptive detail. It deals with data from several domains of linguistics and contributes to an integration of findings from various subdisciplines of linguistics into a common model of the architecture of language. It presents applications and extensions of the model of Construction Morphology to a wide range of languages. Construction Morphology is one of the theoretical paradigms in present-day morphology. It makes use of concepts of Construction Grammar for the analysis of word formation and inflection. Complex words are seen as constructions, that is, pairs of form and meaning. Morphological patterns are accounted for by construction schemas. These are the recipes for coining new words and word forms, and they motivate the properties of existing complex words. Both schemas and individual words are stored, and hence there is no strict separation of lexicon and grammar. In addition to abstract schemas there are subschemas for subclasses of complex words with specific properties. This architecture of the grammar is in harmony with findings from other empirical domains of linguistics such as language acquisition, word processing, and language change.

This Research Topic explores the processing of morphemes, the smallest units of language that bear meaning and that combine to form more complex words. The articles gathered under this Research Topic investigate typical and atypical morphological processing by children and adolescents in ten different languages. These articles provide cross-linguistic and cross-script evidence of the early sensitivity of children to the morphemic structure of words, irrespective of whether they are struggling readers or typically developing. All in all, the collection allows for a better understanding of how morphological processing skills develop, providing valuable clues as to how this competence can be used as a tool to improve literacy acquisition in struggling readers.

The question of how morphologically complex words (assign-ment, listen-ed) are represented and processed in the brain has been one of the most hotly debated topics in the cognitive neuroscience of language. Do complex words engage cortical representations and processes equivalent to single lexical objects or are they processed as sequences of separate morpheme-like units? Research on morphological processing has suggested that adults make efficient use of both lexical (i.e., whole word) storage and retrieval, as well as combinatorial computation in processing morphologically complex words. Psycholinguistic studies have demonstrated that processing of complex words can be affected both by properties of the morphemes and the whole words, such as their frequency, transparency, and regularity. Furthermore, this research has been informative about the time-course of complex word recognition and production, and the role of morphological structure in these processes. At the neural level, left-hemisphere inferior frontal and superior temporal areas, and negative-going event-related potentials, have been consistently associated with morphological processing. While most previous research has been done on the recognition of morphologically complex words in adult native speakers, much less is known about neurocognitive processes involved in the on-line production of morphologically complex words, and even less on morphological processing in children and non-native speakers. Moreover, we have limited understanding of how linguistically distinct morphological processes, e.g. inflectional (listen-ed) versus derivational (assign-ment), are handled by the cortical language networks. This e-book gives an up-to-date overview of the questions currently addressed in the field of morphological processing. It highlights the significance of morphological information in language processing, both written and spoken, as assessed by a variety of methods and approaches. It also points to a number of unresolved issues, and provides future directions for research in this key area of cognitive neuroscience of language.

This book brings together current research findings on the involvement of word-internal structure for the purpose of word reading (especially morphological structure). The central theme of reading complex words is approached from several angles, such that the chapters span a wide variety of topics where this issue is important. It is a valuable resource for all researchers studying the mental lexicon and to those who teach advanced courses in the psychology of language.