LINGUISTICS 535
FALL, 2011
MORPHOLOGY
INSTRUCTOR: Professor Adam Ussishkin
EMAIL: ussishki@u.arizona.edu
OFFICE: Douglass 312
OFFICE HOURS: Tuesday and Thursday, 2-3 pm, and by appointment (use email to set up
appointments)
Class meets every Tuesday and Thursday from 3.30 pm – 4.45 pm in Social Sciences
114. Attendance is required.
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course will focus on morphology, the study of the internal
structure of words in natural language and how words are represented in the mental
lexicon. This is a course which values effort and critical thinking. Student performance is
partially assessed based on classroom discussions, participation, and engagement with the
material.
COURSE WEBSITE: http://d2l.arizona.edu
Click on Student Login OR you can log in through student link -- go to your schedule and
click on this class.
COURSE READINGS: Every effort will be made to make all assigned readings available on
the d2l website. For background reading, I highly recommend:
Spencer, Andrew, and Zwicky, Arnold. 1998. The Handbook of Morphology. Blackwell
Publishing, Oxford, UK and Malden, MA. [note: this book is not available on d2l.]
COURSE REQUIREMENTS
following components:
AND GRADE:
Your grade in this course will be based on the
Attendance: 10%
Regular attendance is very important in this class; absences will be excused only with
valid medical documentation.
In-class participation: 10%
Active participation in class discussion is crucial to helping develop your understanding
of the material.
Questions and discussions: 20%
You will be regularly required to submit content-related questions and responses on
course material (typically based on reading assignments). These questions and responses
must be posted using the discussion function on d2l – there are eight required discussion
forums over the course of the semester.
1
Presentation of reading: 10%
Each student will be responsible for presenting or helping to present at least one reading
assignment in the course. The schedule for these presentations will be determined in the
first or second week of the semester.
Research project: 50%
You will write a research paper (15-30 pages) related to the course material. You must
notify me of your research topic using the d2l drop-box by Thursday, October 13, 2011
(10%); a rough draft is due in the d2l drop-box on Thursday, November 17, 2011
(10%); a final draft is due in the d2l drop-box on Thursday, December 8, 2011 (25%);
and you will give a 20+10-minute presentation of your research paper in class at the end
of the semester (5%).
TENTATIVE
change):
COURSE SCHEDULE AND ASSIGNED READINGS
(this schedule is subject to
August 23, 25: What is morphology?
 Chapters 1-4, Haspelmath, Martin and Sims, Andrea. 2010. Understanding
Morphology (Second Edition). Oxford University Press.
 Optional: Chapters 1-2, Booij, Geert. 2005. The Grammar of Words: An Introduction
to Linguistic Morphology. Oxford University Press.
 Optional: Aronoff, Mark. 1976. Word Formation in Generative Grammar. MIT
Press.
 Optional: Halle, Morris. 1973. Prolegomena to a Theory of Word Formation.
Linguistic Inquiry 4: 3-16.
August 30: Morphological typology
 Chapter 8, Whaley, Lindsay. Introduction to Typology: The Unity and Diversity of
Language. Sage Publications.
September 1: Inflectional and derivational morphology
 Chapter 5, Haspelmath, Martin and Sims, Andrea. 2010. Understanding Morphology
(Second Edition). Oxford University Press.
September 6: Productivity
 Chapter 6, Haspelmath, Martin and Sims, Andrea. 2010. Understanding Morphology
(Second Edition). Oxford University Press.
September 8: Morphophonology
 Chapter 10, Haspelmath, Martin and Sims, Andrea. 2010. Understanding Morphology
(Second Edition). Oxford University Press.
September 13: Frequency effects in morphology
 Chapter 12, Haspelmath, Martin and Sims, Andrea. 2010. Understanding Morphology
(Second Edition). Oxford University Press.
2
September 15: Distributed Morphology
 Halle, Morris, and Marantz, Alec. 1993. Distributed Morphology and the pieces of
inflection. In Kenneth Hale and Samuel Jay Keyser (eds.), The View from Building
20: Essays in Linguistics in Honor of Sylvain Bromberger. Cambridge: MIT Press,
111-176.
 Arad, Maya. 2003. Locality Constraints on the Interpretation of Roots: The Case of
Hebrew Denominal Verbs. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 21:737-778.
September 20, 22: Word and Paradigm Morphology and other word-based
approaches
 Ussishkin, Adam. 2005. A fixed prosodic theory of nonconcatenative templatic
morphology. Natural Language and Linguistics Theory 23:169-218.
 Finkel, Raphael, and Stump, Gregory. 2007. Principal parts and morphological
typology. Morphology 17:39-75
October 4, 6:
 Blevins, James. 2006. Word-based morphology. Journal of Linguistics 42:531-573.
 Joseph, Brian. 2009. Greek dialectal evidence for the role of the paradigm in
inflectional change. Morphology 19:45-57.
October 11:
 Mailhammer, Robert. 2007. Islands of resilience: the history of the German strong
verbs from a systemic point of view. Morphology 17:77-108.
 Sims, Andrea. 2008. Why defective paradigms are, and aren’t, the result of competing
morphological patterns. Proceedings of CLS 43:267-281.
October 13: Corpus-based and experimental approaches to morphology
 Hay, Jennifer, and Baayen, Harald. 2002. Parsing and productivity. In Booij, G. E.
and van Marle, J., eds., Yearbook of Morphology 2001, Kluwer Academic Publishers,
Dordrecht, 203-235.
 Chapter 6, Altmann, Gerry. The Ascent of Babel: An Exploration of Language, Mind,
and Understanding, Second Edition. Oxford University Press.
October 18, 20:
 de Jong, Niva, Schreuder, Robert, and Baayen, Harald. 2000. The morphological
family size effect and morphology. Language and Cognitive Processes 15:329-365.
 Moscoso del Prado-Martín, Fermin, Deutsch, Avital, Frost, Ram, Schreuder, Robert,
de Jong, Niva, and Baayen, Harald. 2005. Changing places: A cross-language
perspective on frequency and family size in Dutch and Hebrew. Journal of Memory
and Language 53:496-512.
October 25, 27:
 Boudelaa, Sami, and Marslen-Wilson, William. 2011. Productivity and priming:
Morphemic decomposition in Arabic. Language and Cognitive Processes 26:624652.
3


Frost, Ram, Forster, Kenneth, and Deutsch, Avital. 1997. What can we learn from the
morphology of Hebrew: A masked priming investigation of morphological
representation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and
Cognition. 23: 829-856.
Deustch, Avital, Frost, Ram, and Forster, Kenneth. 1998. Verbs and nouns are
organized and accessed differently in the mental lexicon: Evidence from Hebrew.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 24:12381255.
November 1, 3:
 Frost, Ram, Deutsch, Avital, and Forster, Kenneth. 2000. Decomposing
morphologically complex words in a nonlinear morphology. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. 26: 751-765.
 Chapter 2, Twist, Alina. 2006. A Psycholinguistic Investigation of the Verbal
Morphology of Maltese. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Arizona.
 Velan, Hadas, and Frost, Ram. 2011. Words with and without internal structure: What
determines the nature of orthographic and morphological processing? Cognition
118:141-156.
 Ussishkin, Adam, Wedel, Andrew, Schluter, Kevin, and Dawson, Colin. 2011
(Submitted) Overcoming the Orthographic Confound in Semitic: Supraliminal and
Subliminal Root and Pattern Priming in Maltese. Ms., University of Arizona.
November 8, 10:
Leftovers or students’ choice of readings
November 15, 17:
Student presentations
November 22:
Research day – work on your research project (no class)
November 24:
Thanksgiving holiday (no class)
November 29, December 1: Student presentations
December 6:
Student presentations
ATTENDANCE/ACCEPTANCE OF LATE WORK
No late work will be accepted without valid documentation (e.g., a note from your health
care professional).
ACADEMIC INTEGRITY
The UA code of academic integrity can be found at:
http://deanofstudents.arizona.edu/codeofacademicintegrity
AWARDING OF INCOMPLETES
Incompletes will not be awarded in this class except under the circumstances outlined in
the university policy on incomplete grades:
http://www.registrar.arizona.edu/gradepolicy/incomplete.htm
4
CODE OF CONDUCT
I will actively enforce the following UA policies relating to the University’s Code of
Conduct: http://deanofstudents.arizona.edu/studentcodeofconduct
 Policy
on
threatening
behavior
by
students:
http://policy.web.arizona.edu/~policy/threatening.pdf
 Policy on disruptive behavior: http://web.arizona.edu/~policy/disruptive.pdf. For
purposes of this class, ‘disruptive behavior’ is defined as behavior that violates
our Code of Conduct.
ACCOMMODATION FOR STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES
If you anticipate issues related to the format or requirements of this course, please meet
with me to discuss ways to ensure your full participation in the course. If you determine
that formal, disability-related accommodations are necessary, you must register with
Disability Resources (520-621-3268; http://drc.arizona.edu) and notify me of your
eligibility for reasonable accommodations. We can then plan how best to coordinate your
accommodations.
5