Word and Paradigm Morphology

This volume provides an introduction to word and paradigm models of morphology and the general perspectives on linguistic morphology that they embody. The recent revitalization of these models is placed in the larger context of the intellectual lineage that extends from classical grammars to current information-theoretic and discriminative learning paradigms. The synthesis of this tradition outlined in the volume highlights leading ideas about the organization of morphological systems that are shared by word and paradigm approaches, along with strategies that have been developed to formalize these ideas, and ways in which the ideas have been validated by experimental methodologies. An extended comparison of contemporary word and paradigm variants isolates the central assumptions about morphological units and relations that distinguish implicational from realizational models and clarifies the relation of these models to morpheme-based accounts.
Designed to be accessible to a wide readership, this book will serve both as an introduction to morphology and morphological theory from the word and paradigm perspective for non-specialists, and for morphologists, as a detailed account of the history of the ideas that underlie these models.

James P. Blevins received his Ph.D in Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1990 and has taught in Cambridge since 1997, where he is currently Reader in Morphology and Syntax. He is a general linguist with a primary focus on the structure and complexity of inflectional and grammatical systems. His research approaches these issues from the standpoint of contemporary word and paradigm models, using analytic tools and insights drawn from information-theoretic and discriminative learning perspectives. He has secondary interests in quantitative and computational models of grammatical systems, as well as in aspects of sound and meaning that interact closely with grammar. His main areal interests fall within Germanic, Finnic, Slavic, and Kartvelian.