The Oxford Handbook of Inflection

This is the latest addition to a group of handbooks covering the field of morphology, alongside The Oxford Handbook of Case (2008), The Oxford Handbook of Compounding (2009), and The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology (2014). It provides a comprehensive state-of-the-art overview of work on inflection - the expression of grammatical information through changes in word forms. The volume's 24 chapters are written by experts in the field from a variety of theoretical backgrounds, with examples drawn from a wide range of languages.

The first part of the handbook covers the fundamental building blocks of inflectional form and content: morphemes, features, and means of exponence. Part 2 focuses on what is arguably the most characteristic property of inflectional systems, paradigmatic structure, and the non-trivial nature of the mapping between function and form. The third part deals with change and variation over time, and the fourth part covers computational issues from a theoretical and practical standpoint. Part 5 addresses psycholinguistic questions relating to language acquisition and neurocognitive disorders. The final part is devoted to sketches of individual inflectional systems, illustrating a range of typological possibilities across a genetically diverse set of languages from Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Australia, Europe, and South America.

Matthew Baerman is a senior research fellow in the Surrey Morphology Group at the University of Surrey. His research focuses on the typology, diachrony, and formal analysis of inflectional systems, with a particular concentration on phenomena whose interpretation is problematic or controversial. His work has appeared in such journals as Language, Journal of Linguistics, Morphology, Lingua, Russian Linguistics and Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. He is co-author of The Syntax-Morphology Interface: a Study of Syncretism (CUP, 2005) and co-editor of Understanding and Measuring Morphological Complexity (OUP, 2014).

1. Introduction, Matthew Baerman
Part I: Building Blocks
2. The Morpheme: Its Nature and Use, Stephen R. Anderson
3. Features in Inflection, Greville G. Corbett
4. Inflectional Exponence, Jochen Trommer and Eva Zimmermann
Part II: Paradigms and their Variants
5. Inflectional Paradigms, James P. Blevins
6. Inflection Classes, Gregory Stump
7. Paradigmatic Deviations, Matthew Baerman
8. Phonology, Gunnar Olafur Hansson
9. Periphrasis and Inflection, Andrew Spencer and Gergana Popova
Part III: Change
10. Diachrony, Claire Bowern
11. Contact-Induced Change, Maarten Kossmann
Part IV: Computation
12. Modelling Inflectional Structure, Dunstan Brown
13. Machine Learning of Inflection, Katya Pertsova
14. Machine Translation, Ondrej Bojar
Part V: Psycholinguistics
15. Inflectional Morphology in Language Acquisition, Sabine Stoll
16. Disorders, Matthew Walenski
Part VI: Sketches of Individual Systems
17. Verbal Inflection in Iha: A Multiplicity of Alignments, Mark Donohue
18. Inflection in Pulaar, Fiona Mc Laughlin
19. Lithuanian Inflection, Axel Holvoet
20. Chamorro Inflection, Thomas Stolz
21. Inflection in Murrinh-Patha, Rachel Nordlinger
22. Aymara Inflection, Matt Coler
23. Inflection in Nen, Nicholas Evans
24. Stem-internal and Affixal Morphology in Shilluk, Bert Remijsen, Cynthia L. Miller-Naude, and Leoma G. Gilley
References
Author Index
Language Index
Subject Index