Lexical Plurals

This chapter discusses the morphological and semantic criteria that have been proposed in the literature to characterize lexical plurals. The chapter provides a distinction between lexical and grammatical plurality and offers a discussion of their respective syntactic representation. It discusses data from a variety of typologically unrelated languages and it briefly addresses the question of the morphosyntactic distribution of plurality in language contact and change.

Morphological complexity, autonomy, and areality in western Amazonia

This chapter investigates the relationship between morphological complexity and language contact and change across western Amazonia. We explore morphological proliferation in particular domains (nominal classification, tense, evidentiality, and valence-adjusting), and follow this with a more systematic exploration of morphological complexity in relation to wordhood status across a sample of eleven Amazonian languages. We argue that a large percentage of bound morphemes in these languages display ambiguity between morphotactic versus syntactic analyses, suggesting that morphological autonomy is best characterized as a matter of degree, and that different degrees of autonomy may apply on a regional scale. Since many accounts of word-internal morphological complexity implicitly rely on notions of autonomy, Amazonian languages invite a revision of our current conception of this domain.