A-Morphous Morphology

A-Morphous Morphology presents a new theory of the structure of words, as it relates to a full generative grammar of language. It rejects the notion that complex words are built up by concatenating simple minimal signs or morphemes, and proposes instead that word structure is described by a system of rule-governed relations between one word and another. In his book, eminent linguist Stephen Anderson offers a discussion of the implications of his own original position for issues in language change, language typology and the computational analysis of word structure.

Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. The study of word structure; 2. Why have a morphology at all?; 3. Is morphology really about morphemes?; 4. The interaction of morphology and syntax; 5. The theory of inflection; 6. Some complex inflectional systems; 7. Morphology in the lexicon: derivation; 8. Clitics are phrasal affixes; 9. The relation of morphology to phonology; 10. How much structure do words have?; 11. Composites: words with internal structure; 12. Morphology and the typology of languages; 13. Morphological change; 14. Morphology as a computational problem; References; Index.