Morphology And Syntax Tools For Analyzing The World's Languages [Paperback]

In this expansion of work by John Daly, Larry Lyman, and Mary Rhodes, Albert Bickford shares his enthusiasm for languages and linguistics with the reader by presenting a practical guide for acquiring skills necessary to analyze the morphology and syntax of languages around the world.

Written in an informal, personal style, this is a practical book for teacher and student alike, a rich storehouse of references and helps in addition to the theoretical content drawn broadly from work within generative grammar. Most chapters begin with a statement of goals and a list of prerequisites for understanding the information contained in them. Examples and explanatory diagrams are distributed liberally throughout the text. The review of key terms, questions for analysis, and sample descriptions which appear at the end of most chapters help the student to apply the theoretical material. References for further reading are provided for those wishing to study further.

Dr. Bickford works in Tucson, Arizona, as a linguistic consultant with the SIL International, teaching and advising language workers who are investigating the languages of Mexico. Most summers he teaches the course from which this book developed at SIL at University of North Dakota, and directs the University s graduate program in linguistics.

Table of contents

1. Introduction
2. Standard Grammatical Terminology
3. Morphemes and Hypotheses
4. ntroduction to Morphology
5. Introduction to Syntax: Constituent Structure, Syntactic Categories, and Grammatical Relations
6. The Base: Phrase Structure Rules and the Lexicon
7. Embedding and Noun Phrase Structure
8. Verbal Valence: Subcategorization and Selectional Restrictions
9. Obliques
10. Inflectional Morphology
11. Derivational Morphology
12. Suppletion and Morphophonemics
13. Nonlinear Affixation
14. Nonactive Complements
15. Variable Orders of Constituents