文章基本信息

标题：Morphological Complexity and Language Contact in Languages Indigenous to North America
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作者：Marianne Mithun
期刊名称：Linguistic Discovery
电子版ISSN：1537-0852
出版年度：2015
卷号：13
期号：2
DOI：10.1349/PS1.1537-0852.A.466
出版社：Dartmouth College Library
摘要：It has long been noticed that morphological complexity is not distributed evenly across the world. There are also well - known geographical pockets of morphological elaboration in areas of Northern Australia, Papua New Guinea, Siberia, and the Caucasus. During the 19 th century, Duponceau (1819), Brinton (1886), and Hewitt (1893) pointed to the special com plexity of languages of the Americas. But the idea that complex morphological structure should show areal distributions seem s counter intuitive: traditional scales of borrowability have typically beg u n with vocabulary, then move d through phonetics and phonology, and on to syntax, with morphology at the end or not mentioned at all. Such scales would seem to be in line with what we know about domains of structure : morphological structure is distinguished from syntax by its routinization: most of it is bel ow the level of consciousness. Bilinguals should be less likely to transfer individual morphemes or morphological patterns from one of their languages to the other than to transfer whole words or word orders