Explorations in Nominal Inflection is a collection of new articles that focus on nominal inflection markers in different languages. The studies are concerned with the morphological inventories of markers, their syntactic distribution, and, importantly, the interaction between the two. As a result, the contributions shed new light on the morphology/syntax interface, and on the role of morpho-syntactic features in mediating between the two components. Issues that feature prominently throughout are inflection class, case, gender, number, animacy, syncretism, iconicity, agreement, the status of paradigms, the nature of morpho-syntactic features, and the structure of nominal projections. Recurrent analytical tools involve the concepts of competition (optimality, specificity), underspecification, and economy, in various theoretical frameworks.James P. Blevins: Inflection Classes and EconomyBernd Wiese: Categories and Paradigms. On Underspecification in Russian Declension

The volume assembles studies on the morphology and syntax of reflexive verbs from a variety of theoretical perspectives (including minimalism and optimality theory), with reference to a number of languages, and focusing on different syntactic domains (clause, NP, AcI). As such, it presents a cross section of present-day research on the field in question.

Cross-language comparison can show where German structures diverge from and converge with those of other languages. The essays in the 2011 Yearbook of the Institute for German Language compare German with other languages on all grammatical levels, from photetics, phonology, graphematics, and morphology to syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and text grammar. In addition, the book presents new methods of language comparison from corpus linguistics. The volume is intended for linguists of German or related languages as well as for teachers of German as a second language.