Mark Aronoff Selected Publications#

1. Word Formation in Generative Grammar. 1976. Linguistic Inquiry Monograph No. 1. l34 + xii pp. MIT Press.

2. Morphology by Itself: Stems and Inflectional Classes. 1994. Linguistic Inquiry Monograph No. 22. 210 + xv pp. MIT Press.

3. What is Morphology? 2004, 3rd Ed. 2022. With Kirsten Fudeman. 316 + xx pp. Blackwell.

4. Sandler, Wendy, Irit Meir, Carol Padden, and Mark Aronoff. The emergence of grammar: Systematic structure in a new language. 2005. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102.7.2662-2665.

5. Sandler, Wendy, Mark Aronoff, Irit Meir, and Carol Padden. 2011. The gradual emergence of phonological form in a new language. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 29. 503 – 543.

6. Lindsay, Mark, and Mark Aronoff. 2013. Self-Organizing morphological systems. In Fabio Montermini, Gilles Boyé, and Jesse Tseng, Eds. Selected Proceedings of the 7th Décembrettes. Lincom Europa. 133-153.

7. Meir, Irit, Mark Aronoff, Carl Börstell, So-One Hwang, Deniz Ilkbasaran, Itamar Kastner, Ryan Lepic, Adi Lifshitz Ben-Basat, Carol Padden, and Wendy Sandler. 2017. The effect of being human and the basis of grammatical word order: Insights from novel communication systems and y

being human and the basis of grammatical word order: Insights from novel communication systems and young sign languages. Cognition 158. 189-207.

8. Berg, Kristian and Mark Aronoff. 2017. Spelling English suffixes. Language 93. 37-64.

9. Aronoff, Mark. 2019. Competitors and alternants in linguistic morphology. In Franz Rainer, Francesco Gardani, Wolfgang Dressler, & Hans Christian Luschützky, Eds. Competition in inflection and word formation. Berlin: Springer. 39-66.

10. Ulicheva, Anastasia, Hannah Harvey, Mark Aronoff, and Kathy Rastle. 2020. Skilled readers’ sensitivities to meaningful regularity in English Spelling. Cognition 195. 103810.

The three books (items 1, 2, and 3) are foundation stones of modern linguistic morphology. The first has been cited almost 6000 times, the second over 2500 times, and both continue to be cited. The third has sparked an interest in morphology among many. One young colleague recently declared that it had changed his life.

The articles on young sign languages (items 4, 5, and 7) are among the most influential in the new area of research that focuses on emerging autochthonous sign languages and have been cited almost 2000 times. Prof. Aronoff is a founding member of an international group that published the first detailed report on such a language (item 4) almost two decades ago in a top-ranked general scientific journal (PNAS). This is his most cited article. The group continues to publish regularly on this language (Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language), changing our understanding of how languages emerge.

The articles on morphological competition (items 6 and 9) are representative of a strand of the candidate’s research that grounds the study of morphological competition (an important area for the last half-century) in principles drawn from the mathematical foundations of the theory of evolution (specifically Gause’s principle of competitive exclusion).

The articles on English spelling (items 8 and 10), all the result of collaboration with a colleague in Germany, use corpus-based and experimental psycholinguistic methods to demonstrate the importance of morphology in English orthography. They represent a recent resurgence of the candidate’s long-standing interest in writing systems and have implications for the teaching of reading