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Are compounds words or phrases - or are they neither or both? How should we classify compounds? How can we deal with the fact that the relationship between the elements of sugar pill ('pill made of sugar') is different from that in sea-sickness pill ('pill to prevent sea-sickness')? Are compounds a linguistic universal? How much do languages vary in the way their compounds work? Why do we need compounds, when there are other ways of creating the same meanings? Are so-called neoclassical compounds like photograph really compounds? Based on more than forty years' research, this controversial new book sets out to answer these and many other questions.
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.