Speaker:  Raphael Finkel

Authors: Raphael Finkel and Gregory Stump

Abstract: In natural-language pedagogy, principal parts are used as a concise way of summarizing a lexeme's full paradigm of inflected forms.  In the context of morphological typology, principal parts may be used as a means of gauging both the nature and the degree of the complexity exhibited by a language's inflectional paradigms.  We show that principal parts afford several different ways of measuring morphological complexity.  We define principal parts, propose desired characteristics (uniqueness, uniformity, optimality), then present seven derived measures of complexity.  We illustrate these measures by referring to Pāli, a middle Indic language.

A talk by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Professor of Media Studies, Ponoma College and Director of Scholarly Communication, Modern Language Association. What if the academic monograph is a dying form? If scholarly communication is to have a future, it's clear that it lies online, and yet the most significant obstacles to such a transformation are not technological, but instead social and institutional. How must the academy and the scholars that comprise it change their ways of thinking in order for digital scholarly publishing to become a viable alternative to the university press book? This talk will explore some of those changes and their implications for our lives as scholars and our work within universities.

Contact Andrew Hippisley andrew.hippisley@uky.edu for additional information.