Course Description

Linguistic morphology deals with the ways in which words are made up of smaller meaningful elements, so that in 'unfriendliness' we can find the elements divided by hyphens in 'un-friend-li-ness'. Each of these elements is recurrent elsewhere in the language with the same meaning. In this short course we will begin by looking at the range of patterns that are found in human language, and then look specifically at the morphology of English, and some of the problems that arise in trying to describe and explain the way in which English morphology functions. We will consider such questions as binarity of structures, the marking of parts of speech (word-classes) and the limitations of stringing elements together.

Presenter

Professor Laurie Bauer

Presenter Biography

Laurie Bauer holds a personal chair in Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He has published widely in the area of morphology, including two textbooks, English Word-Formation (Cambridge University Press, 1983) and Introducing Linguistic Morphology (Edinburgh University Press 1988, 2nd ed 2003), and his monograph Morphological Productivity (Cambridge University Press 2001). He is on the editorial board of the journal Morphology (formerly The Yearbook of Morphology) and is one of the editors of the new journal Word Structure. He has also published widely on international varieties of English, particularly with reference to New Zealand English. He is, with Peter Trudgill, one of the editors of Language Myths (Penguin 1998), and one of the authors of the introductory textbook Language Matters (with Janet Holmes and Paul Warren, Palgrave, 2006).