About
Ingo Plag
Heinrich-Heine University, Düsseldorf
Main areas of research
- Phonetics
- Phonology
- Morphology
- Syntax
- Creole languages
Bio
Ingo Plag is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf. His monographs include Morphological Productivity (Mouton de Gruyter 1999), Word-formation in English (CUP 2nd ed. 2018), Introduction to English Linguistics (with co-authors, Mouton de Gruyter 3rd ed.2015) and A Reference Guide to English Morphology (with co-Authors, Oxford University Press, 2013). He has edited numerous collections of articles, published many papers in peer-reviewed journals. From 2006 to 2021, he served as editor of the journal Morphology. He has acted as referee nationally and internationally for journals, publishing houses, academic institutions and funding organizations. From 2015 to 2023 he was the director of the Research Unit ‘Spoken Morphology’, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. He is a member of the Academia Europaea.
RESEARCH
DFG Project ‘Form and meaning in English compounds: The role of prosody’ (2023-2026)
CRC Project C08/DFG Project ‘The semantics of derivational morphology’ (2015-2026)
Keynote Lecture
What is morphology? Theoretical
linguistics meets computational modeling
Outline
What is morphology? Theoretical linguistics meets computational modeling
Morphology is conceived as the study of word structure, which traditionally has involved the postulation of structural units together with mechanisms that manipulate and combine these units. This categorical view of morphology has recently been challenged by gradient approaches, in which what is generally called ‘morphological structure’ emerges from gradient associations of
form and meaning in language use and language acquistion.
In this presentation, we will take a closer and more general look at the mapping form and meaning in words and develop an alternative to the traditional ways of treating morphology as the combination of structural pieces below the word-level: Morphology is not about the structure of complex words, it is about complex relations of form and meaning in the mental lexicon. We will
discuss computational models that implement this view, and which can be used to test predictions of this lexicon-based and usage-based view of morphology.