The Surrey Morphology Group offers these online databases (see 'Conditions of Use') :
Agreement (15 languages)
Agreement is found in a high proportion of the world’s languages, and its prevalence tends to make us forget what a puzzling phenomenon it is. Basically, agreement is the expression of information in the ‘wrong place’. The database encodes information on agreement in fifteen genetically diverse languages. ... explore ...
Archi
A Dictionary of the Archi (Daghestanian) Language including word sounds and illustrations. ... explore ...
Defectiveness
The project A Typology of Defectiveness, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, completed in February 2009, has aimed to expand our empirical knowledge of this intriguing phenomenon and to clarify its significance for the study of language. ... explore ...
Deponency
These two databases record instances of deponency, which is the term we have adopted to describe mismatches between morphology and morphosyntax. ... explore ...
Features
In attempting to understand language, many researchers use features, the elements into which linguistic units, such as words, can be broken down. Examples of features are NUMBER (singular, plural, dual, ...), PERSON (1st, 2nd, 3rd), and TENSE (present, past, ...). Features have proved invaluable for analysis and description, and have a major role in contemporary linguistics, from the most abstract theorising to the most applied computational applications. ... explore ...
Owners into Actors
This database was created for the project ‘Turning owners into actors: Possessive morphology as subject-indexing in languages of the Bougainville region ', funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under B/RG/AN4375/APN19365. The Northwest-Solomonic (NWS) subgroup of Oceanic (spoken in the Solomon Islands and Bougainville), uses morphology otherwise -- or in some languages, formerly -- employed to index the possessor in nominal constructions for indexing the subject in verbal constructions. We have created a database presenting each relevant aspect of the grammars of a representative sample of languages from each first order and main second order subgroup of NWS. Those primarily involved in the project were Bill Palmer, Dunstan Brown and Greville Corbett. ... explore ...
Periphrasis
Periphrasis is a widespread and significant phenomenon, and a valuable indicator of how a language functions. It reveals how the construction of meaning in language is apportioned between syntax (sentence structure) and morphology (word structure). The research systematically catalogues data from diverse languages and makes it available in a fully structured way to allow useful comparison. ... explore ...
Short Term Morphosyntactic Change
To give a detailed account of morphosyntactic shifts, we monitor the morphosyntactic variation within ten 20-year time slots between 1801 and 2000, using a database that brings together existing evidence, gathered from many disparate sources, and our original statistics derived from a corpus of 19 th and 20 th century Russian texts. ... explore ...
Syncretism (30 languages)
Syncretism is a surprising yet widespread and poorly understood phenomenon in natural language. The database encodes information on inflectional syncretism in 30 genetically and geographically diverse languages, representing such morphosyntactic features as case, person, number and gender, in all the inflectional classes where they are relevant. ... explore ...
Person Syncretism (111 languages)
The database documents instances where the marking of subject person on verbs is syncretic (two or more person values represented by a single form), covering 111 genetically and geographically diverse languages. The database also records properties which might be conditioning factors for syncretism: tense/aspect/mood, inflectional class, gender of subject, and syntactic context. ... explore ...
Suppletion (34 languages)
Suppletion is a morphological phenomenon where different inflectional forms are not related phonologically. ... explore ...
Conditions of Use
The databases can be accessed without cost. Users agree not to pass on the databases to third parties and to properly acknowledge the database as the source of information in publications or manuscripts that make use of its data. When citing information obtained from a database query, please mention the authors, date, and the name of the database and address of the database homepage (all of this information is available from the database homepage). It is also a good idea to give the date you last accessed the database.
For example, a reference to the Surrey Syncretisms Database would be:
Baerman, Matthew, Dunstan Brown and Greville Corbett. 2002. The Surrey Syncretisms Database <http://www.smg.surrey.ac.uk/syncretism/index.aspx > Accessed on [date of access].
For material contained in the language reports, please include the author, date and title of the report, the name of the database (all shown in the upper righthand corner of the document), plus its web address.
For example, a citation of material from the language report for Yimas would read:
Baerman, Matthew. 2002. Language Report: Yimas. The Surrey Syncretisms Database < http://www.smg.surrey.ac.uk/syncretism/index.aspx > Accessed on [date of access].
Contact us at:
Dr Dunstan Brown Surrey Morphology Group (J1) Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences University of Surrey Guildford Surrey GU2 7XH UK d.brown@surrey.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0) 1483 689957