Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Preliminary Material -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Theoretical Preliminaries -- Introduction to Part 2 -- 3 Indexicality -- 4 Syntagmatic Relations -- 5 Paradigmatic Relations -- 6 The Zero Sign -- Introduction to Part 3 -- 7 Inflection and Derivation -- 8 The Combinatorial Properties of Morphological Structures -- 9 Relations across Categories -- 10 Dependency in Morphological Combination -- 11 Expansion and Its Absence in Transcategorial Relations -- Summary of Part 3 -- Introduction to Part 4 -- 12 Infinitive in Danish: Zero vs. at -- 13 Supine vs. Perfect Participle in Danish -- 14 Supine in Danish and Swedish -- 15 Recapitulation -- 16 Morphology Reconsidered: Concluding Discussion -- 17 Final Remarks and Further Perspectives -- References -- Index.

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In this book, Peter Juul Nielsen examines the foundations of morphological theory from a structural-functional perspective on language as a sign system. He offers a framework for the analysis of morpheme relations based on a thorough discussion of syntagmatic and paradigmatic structure, indexical relations, zero as meaningful absence and morphological relations across grammatical categories. It is argued that when paradigmatically related morphological structures have different syntactic functions, the semantics of the paradigmatic opposition consists in the specification of functional potential. The framework is applied in three detailed studies of Danish nonfinite verbs presenting new accounts of their morphological structure, semantic coding and paradigmatic organisation.

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