Bøger af Greville G. Corbett

Gender is a fascinating category, which has grown steadily in importance across the humanities and social sciences. The book centres on the core of the category within language. Each of the seven contributions provides an independent account of a key part of the topic, ranging from gender and sex, gender and culture, to typology, dialect variation and psycholinguistics. The authors pay attention to a broad range of languages, including English, Chukchi, Konso and Mohawk.

Inflectional morphology plays a paradoxical role in language. On the one hand it tells us useful things, for example that a noun is plural or a verb is in the past tense. On the other hand many languages get along perfectly well without it, so the baroquely ornamented forms we sometimes find come across as a gratuitous over-elaboration. This is especially apparent where the morphological structures operate at cross purposes to the general systems of meaning and function that govern a language, yielding inflection classes and arbitrarily configured paradigms. This is what we call morphological complexity. Manipulating the forms of words requires learning a whole new system of structures and relationships. This book confronts the typological challenge of characterising the wildly diverse sorts of morphological complexity we find in the languages of the world, offering both a unified descriptive framework and quantitative measures that can be applied to such heterogeneous systems.

Gender is a fascinating category, central and pervasive in some languages and totally absent in others. In this new, comprehensive account of gender systems, over 200 languages are discussed, from English and Russian to Archi and Chichewa. Detailed analysis of individual languages provides clear illustrations of specific types of system.

A unique examination of a central concept of linguistic analysis: features, such as Number, Person and Tense. Corbett brings together two issues: how features vary between languages and how they work. The book has wide relevance across the discipline.