This volume explores the multiple aspects of morphological complexity, offering typological, acquisitional, sociolinguistic, and diachronic perspectives. The analyses are based on rich empirical data from a wide range of languages, as well as experimental data from artificial language learning.

This book characterises the diverse morphological complexity we find in the languages of the world. Richly illustrated, examples are drawn from dozens of different languages and are subjected to rigorous quantitative analysis. It will be ideal reading for academic researchers and graduate students of linguistics, with a special interest in morphology and English language.

This book aims to assess the nature of morphological complexity, and the properties that distinguish it from the complexity manifested in other components of language. Of the many ways languages have of being complex, perhaps none is as daunting as what can be achieved by inflectional morphology: this volume examines languages such as Archi, which has a 1,000,000-form verb paradigm, and Chinantec, which has over 100 inflection classes. Alongside this complexity, inflection is notable for its variety across languages: one can take two unrelated languages and discover that they share similar syntax or phonology, but one would be hard pressed to find two unrelated languages with the same inflectional systems. In this volume, senior scholars and junior researchers highlight novel perspectives on conceptualizing morphological complexity, and offer concrete means for measuring, quantifying and analysing it. Examples are drawn from a wide range of languages, including those of North America, New Guinea, Australia, and Asia, alongside a number of European languages. The book will be a valuable resource for all those studying complexity phenomena in morphology, and for theoretical linguists more generally, from graduate level upwards.

The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Morphology presents a state-of-the-art, detailed and exhaustive overview of all aspects of Spanish morphology, paying equal attention to the empirical complexities of the morphological system and the theoretical issues that they raise. As such, this handbook is relevant both for those interested in the facts of Spanish morphology and those interested in general morphology that want to explore how the Spanish facts illuminate our understanding of human language and current theories of morphology. This volume is also unique in its extent and coverage. Written by an international team of leading experts in the field, it contains 42 chapters divided into four sections, covering all synchronic and diachronic aspects of Spanish morphology, including inflection; derivation; compounding and other processes of word formation; the interaction of morphology with other modules of grammar and the role of morphology in language acquisition, psycholinguistics and language teaching.

The many facets of grammatical gender remain one of the most fruitful areas of linguistic research, and pose fascinating questions about the origins and development of complexity in language. The present work is a two-volume collection of 13 chapters on the topic of grammatical gender seen through the prism of linguistic complexity. The contributions discuss what counts as complex and/or simple in grammatical gender systems, whether the distribution of gender systems across the world’s languages relates to the language ecology and social history of speech communities. Contributors demonstrate how the complexity of gender systems can be studied synchronically, both in individual languages and over large cross-linguistic samples, and diachronically, by exploring how gender systems change over time. In addition to three chapters on the theoretical foundations of gender complexity, volume one contains six chapters on grammatical gender and complexity in individual languages and language families of Africa, New Guinea, and South Asia. This volume is complemented by volume two, which consists of three chapters providing diachronic and typological case studies, followed by a final chapter discussing old and new theoretical and empirical challenges in the study of the dynamics of gender complexity.

The present volume contains selected papers from the 14th International Morphology Meeting held in Budapest, 13–16 May 2010, organized under the auspices of the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The selection of papers presented here addresses problems of language use in one or another sense, covering issues of regularity, irregularity and analogy, as well as the role of frequency in morphological complexity, morphological change and language acquisition. The languages discussed include Dutch, German, Greek, Hungarian, Lovari (Romani) and Russian. The contributors are Anna Anastassiadis-Symeonidis, Mario Andreou, Márton András Baló, Dunstan Brown, Gabriela Caballero, Anna Maria Di Sciullo, Wolfgang U. Dressler, Roger Evans, Alice C. Harris, László Kálmán, Katharina Korecky-Kröll, Sabine Laaha, Laura E. Lettner, Maria Mitsiaki, Péter Rácz, Angela Ralli, Péter Rebrus, Alan K. Scott, and Miklós Törkenczy.

A state-of-the-art survey of complex words, this volume brings together a team of leading international morphologists to demonstrate the wealth and breadth of the study of word-formation. Encompassing methodological, empirical and theoretical approaches, each chapter presents the results of cutting-edge research into linguistic complexity, including lexico-semantic aspects of complex words, the structure of complex words, and corpus-based case studies. Drawing on examples from a wide range of languages, it covers both general aspects of word-formation, and aspects specific to particular languages, such as English, French, Greek, Basque, Spanish, German and Slovak. Theoretical considerations are supported by a number of in-depth case studies focusing on the role of affixes, as well as word-formation processes such as compounding, affixation and conversion. Attention is also devoted to typological issues in word-formation. The book will be an invaluable resource for academic researchers and graduate students interested in morphology, linguistic typology and corpus linguistics.