Morphological Complexity: Workshop
Call for papers
The Surrey Morphology Group (University of Surrey, UK) and the Department of Linguistics at Harvard University will host a one-day workshop entitled ‘Morphological Complexity: Implications for the Theory of Language', as part of a European Research Council project (grant number: ERC-2008-AdG-230268 MORPHOLOGY). The workshop will be held on January 22, 2010 (Friday), on the Harvard Campus in Cambridge MA. The conference is organized by Matthew Baerman, Greville Corbett and Dunstan Brown (Surrey) and Maria Polinsky (Harvard).
Invited speaker: Gregory Stump (University of Kentucky)
By the term 'morphological complexity', we understand the extra layer of structure that morphological systems may introduce in between meaning and its expression. This layer may operate at cross-purposes to functional distinctions, attaining in some languages an astonishing degree of complexity. Such apparently arbitrary distinctions in form (inflection classes, irregularity and similar phenomena) are the particular focus of the project. They are a key resource for understanding mental processes as they represent an unconscious and yet highly structured autonomous system. This will be the first in a series of workshops, to be held in various locations, addressing the implications that morphological complexity has for (i) general linguistic theory, (ii) psycholinguistics, (iii) historical linguistics and (iv) computational linguistics. The present workshop will focus on question 'i'; that is, the ramifications that morphological complexity has for linguistic theory and models of grammar.
The workshop will involve a mixture of invited papers and those selected by abstract. The theme of the workshop is laid out in a position paper (last updated October 10, 2009), available here. Abstracts are invited for 20 minute presentations (plus a 10-minute question period), within this theme. Anonymous abstracts should be no more than one page, and should be sent as an e-mail attachment (in PDF or Word) by October 31, 2009 to:
| morphological.complexity |  |
googlemail.com |
Any questions may also be sent to this address.