Steve Anderson discusses non-concatenative morphology in Croatia

This week professor Steve Anderson is presenting two talks on non-concatenative morphology in Dubrovnik, Croatia. The first is “The Significance of Semantically Non-Concatenative Morphology” at the 9th Mediterranean Morphology Meeting. In this talk, Steve discusses cases in which some formal marker in a word’s form corresponds not to the addition of content, but to some non-monotonic alteration in the content of the base form. These argue against a view of word structure that sees words as exhaustively analyzable into morphemes with the character of unitary Saussurean signs, each an indissoluble unity of a component of phonological form with a component of syntactic and semantic content.

At the 3rd NetWordS Workshop, Steve will present “Non-Concatenative Morphology as the Product of Diachrnic Change,” in which he argues that normal processes of diachronic change result in the morphologization of non-concatenative differences as morphological rules, and thus that there is nothing unexpected or abnormal about the existence of such rules in morphological systems.