Morphology: The Descriptive Analysis of Words

The present volume is a complete revision of a work of the same title published in 1946 in the University of Michigan Publications in Linguistics. But instead of setting up morphological and phonological processes as basic to the descriptive methodology, it treats the morpheme together with its allomorphs as the fundamental feature. In the first edition most of the language problems consisted of hypothetical data. In this book practically all of the illustrative data used in Chapters 1-9 are from actual languages. Occasionally it has been advisable to introduce hypothetical data into the discussion in order to illustrate a particularly complicated type of structure, but for the most part the hypothetical problems have been placed in the Appendix. These problems should, however, prove to be a valuable supplement to the text, and teachers will discover that their use in classroom discussions

and for assignments will greatly improve the student's ability to handle linguistic data. It is felt that the use of actual-language problems in the text is a distinct improvement over the earlier presentation, since the student learns about the structure of real languages at the same time as he studies methodology. There is an inevitable increase in interest when actual languages are being examined, and complications which may be considered "impossible" by the student when presented in the form of hypothetical data are more readily received when they appear as genuine linguistic phenomena.