Description

Speakers 'know' what a word is, yet linguists have said little about possible words. Words have different forms, such as give and giving, and these are normally related in predictable ways, in terms of meaning (semantics) and form (phonology). However, there are more complex cases. We find suppletion, where the meaning is regular but the forms are totally unrelated (go ~ went). Conversely we may expect different forms but find identical ones. Parallel to I gave and I have given, we find I brought and I have brought. The relation here is one of syncretism. Pairings of the type I write and I am writing can be found for almost any verb, but not: I must go and *I am go. This verb shows defectiveness. And deponency, an interesting, under-researched relation, indicates a form used with an unexpected, non-typical function. One further phenomenon belongs here, since it relates to all the other four, namely agreement. Here grammatical information attached to one word is relevant for another; the information is 'displaced'. The approach taken is to examine in depth a sample of carefully chosen languages taken from different linguistic families (hence as diverse as possible), in order to establish the range of variation and the constraints on this variation.

Outputs

Publications

Corbett, Greville G. 2003. Agreement: overview. In: William J. Frawley (ed.) International Encyclopedia of Linguistics: Second edition, volume I, 53-55. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [new entry for the 2nd edition]

Corbett, Greville G. 2003. Agreement: Terms and boundaries. In: William Griffin (ed.) The Role of Agreement in Natural Language : TLS 5 Proceedings (Texas Linguistic Forum 53), 109-122.
Available at: http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~tls/2001tls/2001proceeds.html.

Hippisley, Andrew, Marina Chumakina, Greville G. Corbett and Dunstan Brown. 2004. Suppletion: frequency, categories and distribution of stems. Studies in Language 28.387-418

Corbett, Greville G. 2004. The Russian Adjective: A pervasive yet elusive category. In: R. M. W. Dixon and A. Aikhenvald (eds) Adjective classes: a cross-linguistic typology, 199-222. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Corbett, Greville G. 2004. Grammatical relations in a typology of agreement systems. In: Bernard Comrie, Pirkko Suihkonen and Valery Solovyev (eds) International Symposium The Typology of Argument Structure and Grammatical Relations 11-14 May, 2004, Kazan, Proceedings, 35-38. Kazan: Kazan State University.

Corbett, Greville G. Forthcoming. The Number of Genders, Sex-Based and Non-Sex-Based Gender Systems, and Gender Assignment Systems (three chapters and maps). To appear in: Martin Haspelmath, Matthew Dryer, David Gil, and Bernard Comrie (eds) World Atlas of Language Structures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Corbett, Greville G. Forthcoming. Systems of nominal classification I: Gender oppositions. To appear in: D. Alan Cruse, Franz Hundsnurscher, Michael Job and Peter Rolf Lutzeier (eds) Lexicology: An International Handbook. on the Nature and Structure of Words and Vocabularies. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Corbett, Greville G. Forthcoming. Suppletion in personal pronouns: theory versus practice, and the place of reproducibility in typology. To appear in: Linguistic Typology 8.3 (2004).

Marina Chumakina, Andrew Hippisley and Greville G. Corbett. Forthcoming. Istori eskie izmenenija v russkoj leksike: slu aj  eredujua egosja suppletivizma. [Historical changes in the Russian lexicon: an instance of alternating suppletion.] To appear in Russian Linguistics.

Corbett, Greville G. Forthcoming. The canonical approach in typology. To appear in: Zygmunt Frajzyngier, David Rood and Adam Hodges (eds) Linguistic Diversity and Language Theories. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Corbett, Greville G., Dunstan Brown, Marina Chumakina and Andrew Hippisley. Forthcoming. Resources for Suppletion: A Typological Database and a bibliography. To appear in: Mediterranean Morphology Meeting 4, Proceedings.

Baerman, Matthew, Dunstan Brown and Greville G. Corbett. Forthcoming. Inflectional Syncretism. To be published in the Cambridge University Press Blue Series

Baerman, Matthew and Greville G. Corbett. Under review. Prolegomena to a Typology of Defectiveness.

Presentations

[By Greville G. Corbett unless otherwise noted]

16  August 2002. The Russian Adjective: A pervasive yet elusive category. International Workshop on Adjective Classes, Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, La Trobe University, 12-17 August, 2002.

19  August 2002. Possible words : The limits allowed by inflectional morphology. University of Melbourne.

22  August 2002. A Canonical Approach to Typology: Agreement as a Case Study. UC Berkeley, joint seminar of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Linguistics Department.

31  August 2002: Agreement: a typological database and the place of the Slavonic systems. Paper read at the 27th Meeting of the Grammatical Commission of the International Committee of Slavists, Virrat, Finland, 30th Aug.-1st September, 2002.

24  February 2003. Possible words : the limiting points in inflectional morphology. University of Oxford. .

11  April 2003. A Typology of Suppletion and the Notion Possible Word . Workshop on Paradigm Irregularities , University of Manchester, 10-11 April 2003.

16  May 2003. The canonical approach in typology. Conference on Linguistic Diversity and Language Theories. Boulder, Colorado 14-17 May, 2003.

10-17 June 2003. Scandinavian Slavists Summer School, Kungälv, near Gothenburg, Sweden

I.    Agreement: the special place of the Slavonic systems in a general typology

II.   Network Morphology: a new way of looking at inflectional morphology in Slavonic

III. Suppletion: expectations and the Slavonic patterns

28  July 2003. Brown, Dunstan, Greville Corbett, Carole Tiberius. 2003. Qualitative Typological Databases: The Surrey Experience. XVII International Congress of Linguistics. Prague. July 24-29. [Presented by CT.]

25  July 2003. The typology of possible words: the place of suppletion. The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Leipzig, Department of Linguistics.

15  August 2003. A typology of suppletion: the evidence from Slavonic. Paper at the XIII International Congress of Slavists, Ljubljana, 15-21 August 2003. [Available as a grey publication at https://dspace.gla.ac.uk/retrieve/36/CorbettEd.pdf]

1-12 September 2003 ALT Summer school, Cagliari. Ten lectures Typology of Agreement Constructions .

3    September 2003. ALT Summer School evening lecture: Newtonian linguistics: how typologists look for surprises

21-23 September 2003. Typology of the morphological extreme. MMM4 on Morphology and Language Typology , Catania (Sicily, Italy) 

26  September 2003. Marina Chumakina, Dunstan Brown, Greville G. Corbett and Andrew Hippisley. The Surrey Database of Suppletion. Workshop on Database-driven linguistic typology at the Language Typology Research Centre Annual Meeting, 25-27 September 2003, Estoril. [Presented by GGC.]

21  October 2003. Extreme words: a typology of suppletion. School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

12-16 January 2004. The Typology of agreement. Series of five lectures given at the LOT Winter School, Amsterdam.

21  January 2004 (a.m.). Extreme words: suppletion and beyond. Paper read at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen.

21  January 2004 (p.m.). Possible words, possible categories: Number. Paper read at the Americanists Group, Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen.

13  February 2004. Possible word : perspectives from inflection. Paper read at the Workshop Possible Word , at the 11^th International Morphology Meeting, Vienna 13.2.2004

13  February 2004. Matthew Baerman, Dunstan Brown, Marina Chumakina, Greville Corbett, Andrew Hippisley and Carole Tiberius. Resources for morphological typology: the Surrey databases. Paper read at the Workshop Possible Word , at the 11^th International Morphology Meeting, Vienna 13.2.2004. [Presented by MB and MC.]

16  February 2004. Matthew Baerman, Greville Corbett, Dunstan Brown, Nicholas Evans and Marianne Mithun. Extended deponency: the right morphology in the wrong place. Paper presented at the 11^th International Morphology Meeting, Vienna 14-17.2.2004 [Presented by MB.]

11  May 2004. Grammatical relations in a typology of agreement systems. Paper presented at LENCA-II: International symposium The Typology of Argument Structure and Grammatical Relations 11-14 May, 2004, Kazan.

24  May 2004. Possible words: what inflectional morphology tells us about them. Institut für Englische Philologie, Free University of Berlin.

26  May 2004. The typology of possible words: a view from inflectional morphology. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig.

20  July 2004. Inflectional morphology and possible words . Workshop on Possible Words, University of Surrey.

31  August 2004. Possible morphological words. Paper read at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain, University of Surrey Roehampton, 30 August 2 September 2004.

1    September 2004. Matthew Baerman and Greville Corbett. Towards a typology of deponency: features and domains. Paper read at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain, University of Surrey Roehampton, 30 August 2 September 2004. [Presented by MB]

10   September 2004. Inflectional morphology and the typology of possible words. North West Centre for Linguistics, Autumn 2004 Research Training Programme, Manchester, 6-10 September 2004.