Diachronic Morphology in Cross-Linguistic Perspective

Suny At Stony Brook, Stony Brook NY

Investigators

Abstract

With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Alice C. Harris will conduct four years of linguistic research on historical morphology (changes over time in the forms of words). The goal of the research is to discover the universal forces that change the forms of words. Previous studies of historical morphology have emphasized the languages of Europe and the Indo-European family, but a broader database is more likely to reveal universals of change. This project will continue Dr. Harris's earlier research on languages of the Kartvelian and North East Caucasian families. It will also draw on published discussions of historical morphology of many other language families. The method that will be used involves cross-linguistic comparison of very similar changes in very different languages. For example, it has been found that in a number of unrelated languages, the third person singular form of the verb has been generalized as the base of all persons and numbers, leaving the third person singular verb with no special marking. In this research, both the similarities and differences in such generalizations will be studied. An understanding of how complex linguistic paradigms arise and are restructured will tell us a great deal about the role of cognition in managing the use of linguistic categories, such as tense and case. This study of morphological change will thus contribute to a better understanding of language change broadly. In addition, this study will contribute to morphological theory.