Bronwyn Bjorkman @ UCLA

In May this year, Dr. Bronwyn Bjorkman delivered an invited colloquium talk in the Department of Linguistics at UCLA. The title of her talk was "A morphological approach to (apparently) phonologically motivated empty morphs”, and it addressed a cross linguistic pattern in which some languages seem to insert apparently meaningless word pieces under certain conditions. Such patterns pose a puzzle for some current theories of morphology in linguistics. The talk explored the range of options for analyzing both ordinary empty morphs and morphs that are meaningful uses elsewhere in the language but have an apparently “empty” use in some contexts, focusing in particular how the purely realizational theory of Distributed Morphology  could be modified to account for these patterns.