Surrey Morphology Group
Surrey Morphology Group (SMG) is a linguistics research centre dedicated to the study of language diversity and its theoretical consequences.
Our research combines the investigation of grammatical categories in a broad sample of languages with the use of explicit formal and statistical frameworks for the expression of typological and theoretical generalizations.
SMG has received funding from the European Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, among others.
This exhibition of pictures and cultural artefacts from Kilivila and Mian explores the threatened cultures and categorisation systems of two endangered languages.
The inflectional morphology of Oto-Manguean languages can be realised by a rich array of morphological forms within a single word, resulting in highly complex systems.
Morphological systems introduce a layer of structure between meaning and its expression attaining in some languages an astonishing degree of complexity.
The online version of the Archi dictionary contains sound files, digital pictures of culturally significant objects, idioms and example sentences with interlinear glossing.
Elicited and spontaneous examples from SENĆOŦEN, the language of the Saanich people, are organised according to their role as sentences, verbs or roots.
Features are fundamental components of linguistic description that have proven invaluable for conducting grammatical analysis and linguistic theorising.
Possessive morphology is used as a source of subject-indexing marking actors or agents in the languages surrounding the Bougainville region of Papua New Guinea.
Periphrasis reveals how meaning is apportioned between morphology ('bright' and 'brighter') and syntax ('intelligent' and 'more intelligent').
The term 'defectiveness' refers to gaps in inflectional paradigms that do not appear to follow from natural restrictions imposed by meaning or function.
Short term morhosyntactic change concerns changes in the use of forms in a short period of time even when the forms themselves have changed relatively little.
Deponency is the term used to describe mismatches that occur when a word form is used in some function incompatible with its normal function.
Suppletion is a morphological phenomenon where different inflectional forms of the same sign are maximally regular in their semantics, yet maximally irregular in form.
Agreement is the expression of grammatical information in the ‘wrong place’: a relation that can be described in terms of controllers, targets, domains and conditions.
Person syncretism occurs when two or more person values are represented by a single form in the inflectional paradigm for agreement with an argument on verbs.
The term 'syncretism' refers to the phenomenon whereby a single form fulfils two or more different functions in the within the inflectional morphology of a language.