English is sometimes difficult for foreign-language speakers to navigate.

Laurie Bauer of Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, has been given a grant of over $400,000 US to produce the most extensive morphological analysis of the English language to date. In linguistics, morphology is the study of how words are formed.

"We are looking at how words are made up of smaller bits, and how those words are then interpreted, Professor Bauer told Stuff.co.nz. "For example, 'unfriendliness' is made up from 'un,' 'friend,' 'ly,' and 'ness.'"

"There are a lot of 'rules' in English we assume everyone knows, because the language has been around for so long, and we've been teaching it to foreigners for so long. But the fact is we don't [know them]. An example is the plural of fish - when do you say two fish, and when do you say two fishes? There are various suggestions, but there is not one simple answer."

Other eccentricities pointed out by the academic include the plural of Mickey Mouse.

"Mickey Mouses, right? Yet a foreign learner would have learned that the plural of 'mouse' is 'mice' in all circumstances. There are so many complications in the English language that have never really been explored before. That's what this book will attempt to do."

The project will take three years, and involves a searchable database of over 100 million English words.

"You can search for words that have similar patterns – for example all the words that end in 'ist'. That way we can see what kind of things people are doing with the English language," the linguist explained.

Bauer has been studying morphology for over three decades. His new research is being financed by the Marsden Fund, a government body founded in 1994 to fund "excellent fundamental research" in New Zealand.

31 January 2010