LEL2D Morphosyntax (2026)
Welcome
Welcome to the companion website for the morphosyntax part of LEL2D. Every week, I’ll post a few notes on that week’s topic. In addition, Figure 1 shows a map of languages that we’re discussing throughout the morphosyntax part of LEL2D.
Syllabus for this part
In Week 7, we’re starting with an overview of inflectional morphology across languages, sampling the inventory of types of markers and phenomena the languages of the world show. While focussing on morphology, we’ll already be touching on questions of morphosyntax. And we’ll talk about what this means!
In Week 8, we moved beyond words and we start looking at relations in the clause such as agreement and case-marking. We also got to know alignment, that is different ways of grouping arguments in the clause with respect to agreement and case.
In Week 9, we are discussing valency and valency-changing processes such as the passive and applicative constructions. We’ll see how the phenomena we have gotten to know so far relate to these valency-changing operations and how they interact with them.
Week 10 is about formal and functional explanations of some of the phenomena we discuss. How do different linguists conceptualise case and agreement? How do they try to explain why the distribution of phenomena is not symmetrical across languages?
Finding languages to study
By study, I mean study scientifically, not necessarily in the sense of learning the language. A great way to apply what you learn in this course is to look through descriptions (grammars) of languages and see what kinds of phenomena they exhibit and how these vary from other languages you might be familiar with. These works are (mostly) not pedagogical, they are descriptions of the grammars of languages.
Language map
I will update this map every week when we discuss data from new languages! I’ve taken information about the languages from Hammarström et al. (2025) and I have created the map with R, using the package ggmap (Kahle & Wickham 2013).
If you’re interested in learning about how I created the map, see here.