This was an ESRC funded research project which was concerned with the development of a formal approach to the morphology of diverse languages.

As part of the attempt to define the possible structures of human language we analysed the morphology (word-structure) of typologically diverse languages (that is, those of various types, including those radically different from English). The framework within which the principles of possible variation are articulated is Network Morphology. Analyses are represented in the lexical knowledge representation language DATR, allowing computer verification of the accuracy of the analyses. Thus this research constitutes a contribution to the fields of linguistic typology and morphology, using computational (formal) methods.

Network Morphology was initially developed for representing complex data from Russian. This development contrasted languages which have morphology at opposite ends of the spectrum of possibilities. Slavonic languages (Bulgarian, Polish and Russian) represent languages with fusional morphology (where disparate information is packed into small segments). They were contrasted with two polysynthetic languages (the Eskimo language Yup'ik and the Australian language Mayali) which can build up long, complex but segmentable word-forms.

For each language a computational model was developed using DATR , so that we could make and evaluate explicit theoretical claims and check that the correct forms were indeed predicted. Understanding the range of possible human languages enables us to understand our own, for theoretical and practical (computational) purposes.

Publications (in chronological order)

Corbett, Greville G. and Marianne Mithun. 1996. Associative forms in a typology of number systems: evidence from Yup’ik. Journal of Linguistics 32, 1-17.

Brown, Dunstan 1997. Review: Robert Beard, Lexeme-Morpheme Base Morphology. A General Theory of Inflection and Word Formation. Albany: State University of New York Press, Linguistics 35 (3), 597-600.

Fraser, Norman M. and Greville G. Corbett. 1997. Defaults in Arapesh. Lingua 103, 25-57.

Corbett, Greville G. and Norman M. Fraser. 1997. Komp’juternaja lingvistika i tipologija. Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta. Serija 9: Filologija, 122-140.

Brown, Dunstan 1998 a. Defining ‘subgender’: virile and devirilised nouns in Polish. Lingua 104, 187-233.

Brown, Dunstan 1998 b. Stem Indexing and Morphonological Selection in the Russian Verb.In: R. Fabri, A. Ortmann and T. Parodi (eds.) Models of Inflection, 196-221. Niemeyer: Tübingen.

Corbett, Greville G. 1998 a. Morphology and Agreement. In: Arnold Zwicky and Andrew Spencer (eds) A Handbook of Morphology, 191-205. Blackwell: Oxford.

Corbett, Greville G. 1998 b. Constraints on Agreement. In: Bernard Caron (ed.) Actes du 16^è Congrès International des Linguistes. Oxford: Elsevier Sciences.

Evans, Nicholas; Brown, Dunstan and Corbett, Greville G. 1998. Emu Divorce: A Unified Account of Gender and Noun Class Assignment in Mayali. In: M. C. Gruber, D. Higgins, K. Olson and T. Wysocki  CLS 34: Papers from the 34th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 127-142. Chicago: CLS.

Corbett, Greville G. and Fraser, Norman M. 1999. Default genders. In: Barbara Unterbeck and Matti Rissanen (eds) Gender in Grammar and Cognition. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Corbett, Greville G. 1999 a. Resolution rules for gender agreement in Tsakhur. In: Ja. G. Testelets and E. V. Rakhilina (eds) Typology and linguistic theory.  From description to explanation.  For the 60th anniversary of Aleksandr E. Kibrik, 400-411.  Moscow: Jazyki russkoj kul’tury.

Corbett, Greville G. 1999 b. Prototypical inflection: implications for typology. In: Geert Booij and Jaap van Marle (eds) Yearbook of Morphology 1998.

Corbett, Greville G. and Norman M. Fraser 2000. Gender assignment: a typology and a model. In: Gunter Senft (ed.) Systems of Nominal Classification(Language, Culture and Cognition 4), 293-325.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Corbett, Greville G. forthcoming. Hypotheses on the status of number. To appear in: Angela Ralli and Sergio Scalise (eds) Proceedings of the First Mediterranean Conference on Morphology.

Mithun, Marianne and Corbett, Greville G. 1999. The effect of noun incorporation on argument structure. In: Lunella Mereu (ed.) The boundaries of morphology and syntax, 49-71. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Corbett, Greville G. forthcoming. Gender 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.

Brown, Dunstan forthcoming. Conjugation and Declension. 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.