Canonical Morphology and Syntax

Dunstan Brown is a member of the Surrey Morphology Group, University of Surrey and, Professor at the University of York. His research interests include autonomous morphology, morphology-syntax interaction and typology. His recent work has focused on describing and understanding different aspects of morphological complexity, notably The Syntax-Morphology Interface: A Study of Syncretism (with Matthew Baerman and Greville G. Corbett, CUP 2005) and Network Morphology (with Andrew Hippisley, CUP 2012). Marina Chumakina is a Research Fellow in the Surrey Morphology Group, University of Surrey. Her work focuses on Nakh-Daghestanian languages and typology. She has done extensive fieldwork on Archi language resulting in an electronic Archi Dictionary (together with Dunstan Brown, Greville G. Corbett and Harley Quilliam). Greville G. Corbett is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics, University of Surrey, and leads the Surrey Morphology Group. He works on the typology of features, as in Gender (1991), Number (2000) and Agreement (2006) and Features (forthcoming), all with Cambridge UP. Recently he has been developing the canonical approach to typology. He is one of the originators of Network Morphology; see The Syntax-Morphology Interface: A Study of Syncretism (with Matthew Baerman and Dunstan Brown, CUP 2005).

This volume successfully illustrates how Canonical Typology helps resolve a number of debates in typological description. In many cases, the canonical typologies presented expand the scope of investigation for a given topic to include phenomena previously thought irrelevant. In all cases, these typologies pave the way for a much more robust and detailed description of these phenomena, which future linguists should find invaluable.

• 1. What there might be and what there is: an introduction to Canonical Typology ; 2. A base for canonical negation ; 3. Canonical morphosyntactic features ; 4. Some problems in the typology of quotation: a canonical approach ; 5. Unpacking finiteness ; 6. The canonical clitic ; 7. Passive agents: prototypical vs. canonical passives ; 8. The criteria for reflexivization ; 9. Possession and modification - a perspective from Canonical Typology ; 10. An ontological approach to Canonical Typology: laying the foundations for e-linguistics ; References ; Author Index ; Language Index ; Subject Index