Morphology is the study of the smallest meaningful elements in language. The goal of this course is to introduce the basic morphological concepts that are used to describe and explain the internal structure of words in a cross-linguistic fashion. What is special about Arabic or Hindi plural formation, how are concepts of vowel harmony applied to languages such as Finnish or Hungarian, does Mandarin Chinese inflect its words at all?
This course will take a critical look at the theoretical notions that have been developed to account for these and other phenomena encountered in word structure. We will apply these notions to the analysis of as many languages as possible inlcuding the methods of linguistic fieldwork using the fieldwork classes of the Virtual Linguistics Campus.
