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Part of
All Things Morphology: Its independence and its interfaces
Edited by Sedigheh Moradi, Marcia Haag, Janie Rees-Miller and Andrija Petrovic
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 353] 2021
► pp. 17–40

Chapter 2
Making sense of morphology

Foxes, hedgehogs and a calculus of infinitesimals

| UC San Diego
Aronoff (2016) argues for the value of interpreting different approaches to the analysis of morphology as reflecting the sensibilities of foxes and hedgehogs as characterized in Berlin (1997). It is argued that Berlin also provides a way to go beyond these oppositional sensibilities and the morphological theories they develop by exploring a complex systems perspective on morphological organization of the sort adumbrated by certain late 19th century and early 20th century linguists: systems that arise from the dynamic co-activity of surprisingly many factors. The kind of view they envisioned is now quantitatively and computationally practicable and can benefit from research on complex behaviors within the developmental sciences. A view of this sort is motivated by two types of empirical evidence, one concerning implicative paradigm organization in Māori and Baale, the other concerning the dynamic relation between diachrony and synchrony as attested in Mari and Beserman Udmurt.
Keywords: developmental science, implicative organization, morphologization, morphological organization, paradigms, complex systems, variable morphotactics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Early systemic intuitions concerning Item and Pattern models
  • 3.The mirage of space between diachrony and synchrony: Systemic morphological organization in Māori and Baale
  • 4.The mirage of space between diachrony and synchrony
  • 5.Concluding observations
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 25 August 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.353.02ack
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