Лекции Гревила Корбета лингвистам НИУ ВШЭ

 В мае 2013 г. на факультете филологии НИУ ВШЭ замечательный британский лингвист Гревил Корбет прочел цикл лекций на тему 
 "Grammatical features and morphological complexity: a canonical approach". 
 

Greville G. Corbett
(Surrey Morphology Group)

 What is a possible human language? Typology tackles this question by determining the types, and the possibilities of co-occurrence between them. Typologists have taken on successively more difficult issues, and these bring a need for new methods. In a recent proposal, the canonical approach, we take definitions to their logical end point, enabling us to build theoretical spaces of possibilities. Unlike in classical typology, we only then ask how this space is populated with real instances. This approach has been adopted for problems in morphology, in syntax, and to a more limited extent in phonology and in semantics. The three lectures will focus on morphology and syntax, particularly on the interesting problems that we find at the interface between them, looking at the morphosyntactic features. 

1.     A typological perspective on features

2.     The penumbra of morphosyntactic features

3.     Lexical splits and complex morphology

We shall examine challenging data from a range of languages, from Dagestan to New Guinea (as well as some more familiar ones), setting up clean and neat typologies, and then seeing how real languages fit and do not fit into our typologies. Relevant papers are available at:

http://www.surrey.ac.uk/englishandlanguages/research/smg/canonicaltypology/bibliography/. In addition, two relevant volumes have appeared recently:

Dunstan Brown, Marina Chumakina & Greville G. Corbett (editors) Canonical Morphology and Syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Greville G. Corbett. Features. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.