Theoretical Linguistics

Morphology

Morphology is the grammar of words. Morphologists study how words are built and what principles govern their form and their function.

Most languages of the world have complex words: words consisting of smaller meaningful elements. Variants of the same word, such as English “love”, “loves” and “loved”, are organized in families called paradigms. At LUCL, both the internal structure of words and the nature of their paradigms are studied from diverse angles.

Words express meaning, but also grammatical functions such as plural, past tense, dative case or feminine gender. All of these grammatical functions pose their own theoretical challenges, many of which are investigated at LUCL.

Morphology is also of central interest in descriptive linguistics, experimental linguistics, historical and comparative linguistics, and in language acquisition research.