12.3096, Review: Spencer & Zwicky, Handbook of Morphology

LINGUIST List linguist at linguistlist.org
Sat Dec 15 22:10:16 UTC 2001


LINGUIST List:  Vol-12-3096. Sat Dec 15 2001. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 12.3096, Review: Spencer & Zwicky, Handbook of Morphology

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Wayne State U.<aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Dry, Eastern Michigan U. <hdry at linguistlist.org>
            Andrew Carnie, U. of Arizona <carnie at linguistlist.org>

Reviews (reviews at linguistlist.org):
	Simin Karimi, U. of Arizona
	Terence Langendoen, U. of Arizona

Editors (linguist at linguistlist.org):
	Karen Milligan, WSU 		Naomi Ogasawara, EMU
	Jody Huellmantel, WSU		James Yuells, WSU
	Michael Appleby, EMU		Marie Klopfenstein, WSU
	Ljuba Veselinova, Stockholm U.	Heather Taylor-Loring, EMU
	Dina Kapetangianni, EMU		Richard Harvey, EMU
	Karolina Owczarzak, EMU		Renee Galvis, WSU

Software: John Remmers, E. Michigan U. <remmers at emunix.emich.edu>
          Gayathri Sriram, E. Michigan U. <gayatri at linguistlist.org>

Home Page:  http://linguistlist.org/

The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, Wayne
State University, and donations from subscribers and publishers.



Editor for this issue: Terence Langendoen <terry at linguistlist.org>
 ==========================================================================
What follows is another discussion note contributed to our Book
Discussion Forum.  We expect these discussions to be informal and
interactive; and the author of the book discussed is cordially invited
to join in.

If you are interested in leading a book discussion, look for books
announced on LINGUIST as "available for discussion."  (This means that
the publisher has sent us a review copy.)  Then contact
Simin Karimi at simin at linguistlist.org
or Terry Langendoen at terry at linguistlist.org.

Subscribe to Blackwell's LL+ at http://www.linguistlistplus.com/ and
donate 20% of your subscription to LINGUIST! You get 30% off on
Blackwells books, and free shipping and postage!


=================================Directory=================================

1)
Date:  Wed, 12 Dec 2001 10:05:23 +0000 (GMT)
From:  Alexandra Galani <ag153 at york.ac.uk>
Subject:  Review of Spencer & Zwicky, Handbook of Morphology

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Wed, 12 Dec 2001 10:05:23 +0000 (GMT)
From:  Alexandra Galani <ag153 at york.ac.uk>
Subject:  Review of Spencer & Zwicky, Handbook of Morphology

Spencer, Andrew, and Arnold M. Zwicky, ed. (2001) The Handbook of
Morphology. Blackwell Publishers, paperback ISBN 0-631-22694-X,
xvi+815pp, $49.95. Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics (hardback
ISBN 0-631-18544-5, 1998)

Alexandra Galani, University of York, United Kingdom

DESCRIPTION OF THE BOOK
This volume is a collection of thirty-two articles on morphology,
varying from discussions on a wide range of morphological issues
(such as inflection and derivation) to discussions on the
interaction of morphology with grammar (such as morphology and
syntax, morphology and lexical semantics), theoretical issues
(prosodic morphology, word syntax), morphology in a wider setting
(such as diachronic morphology, morphology and aphasia) and
finally on the exploration of the morphology of individual
languages (such as Archi and Celtic). The book is divided into
five main parts:

Part I:   The Phenomena (pp. 11-148),
Part II:  Morphology and Grammar (pp. 149-280),
Part III: Theoretical Issues (pp. 281-348),
Part IV:  Morphology in a Wider Setting (pp. 349-452),
Part V:   Morphological Sketches of Individual Languages
          (pp. 453-707).
References (pp. 737-790), subject (pp. 791-799) and author (pp.
810-815)  indexes are also available at the end of the book.

In what follows I aim to provide the readers with as many details
as possible on what each of the chapters is about instead of
focusing on specific questions.

The Introduction
The editors begin their Introduction by highlighting the
importance of morphology in the field of linguistics, and they
suggest that "morphology is at the conceptual centre of
linguistics" (p.1). They further explain that morphology, which
is the study of words that incorporate with phonology, syntax as
well as semantics in order to derive phrases and sentences
(phonology) exhibiting syntactic structure (syntax) and meaning
(semantics), is an area all linguists should know about. This
very first sentence is also used as an introduction to refer to
the different theories on morphology as well as to the questions
each one deals with, introducing the subject of each of the
chapters at the same time.

The Introduction can be further divided into three main parts. In
the first, and largest part, a brief presentation of the
different theories on morphology is offered. The editors take the
time to illustrate some of the main points of each theory
focussing on the questions, which are then discussed in detail in
the chapters. This theoretical retrospection starts with a short
description of works, such as Kiefer (1973), Bierwisch (1967) and
Philippaki-Warburton (1973), in all of which morphology was seen
as part of phonology or syntax, continuing with works such as
Siegel (1979) and Baker (1985), ushering in a new era for
morphology. Also treated are inflectional and derivational
morphology, and the interface of morphology and syntax and
semantics. This part of the Introduction corresponds to Part I
and Part II of the book.

The second part of the Introduction refers to Part III of the
book, which explores the application of morphology in a wider
context. The editors devote a few paragraphs on offering a
description on chapter (18) by Brian D. Joseph on "Diachronic
Morphology", chapter (19) by Eve C. Clark on "Morphology in
Language Acquisition" and chapter (20) by James M. McQueen and
Anne Cutler on "Morphology and Aphasia".

Finally, the third part of the Introduction refers to Part V of
the book, where an analysis of some interesting morphological
phenomena in specific languages is offered. This part ends with a
table of the most interesting features, which are identified by
these analyses in each of the languages in question.

Part I  - The Phenomena
Article 1: Inflection           Gregory T. Stump
The first chapter of this section explores the notion of
inflection. Stump begins his chapter with the definitions of
lexeme, root of lexeme and paradigm. He then moves onto
presenting a set of empirical criteria in order to distinguish
inflection from derivation and clitics. He also introduces the
morphosyntactic properties, such as agreement, governed and
inherent(properties). A discussion on some of the inflectional
properties of nouns, verbs and adjectives is additionally
offered. Dealing with the realisation of inflection, Stump
discusses inflectional exponence and inflectional "templates".
The last section explores the theoretical approaches to
inflection, beginning with the lexicalist approach (Selkirk
(1982), Lieber (1992)), moving onto the functional head approach
(Pollock (1989) but also Rivero (1990) and its critique by Joseph
and Smirniotopoulos (1993)), the word-and-paradigm approach
(Matthews (1972), Anderson (1977, 1992)) and finally Distributed
Morphology (DM) (Halle and Marantz (1993)). Throughout this
chapter the discussion is supported by rich examples.

Article 2: Derivation           Robert Beard
Beard begins with the definition of derivation and moves onto
discussing lexicalism in order to explore the derivation-
inflection interface. He then turns onto the theoretical accounts
on derivation; derivation as lexical selection (Lieber (1992)),
derivation as morphological operations (Anderson (1992), Aronoff
(1976, 1994)) and derivation as lexical relations (Jackendoff
(1975), Bybee (1988)). In the next section a discussion on
derivation heads, such as affixes as heads and head operations,
is offered followed by the derivation in synthetic compounds and
morphological asymmetry. Furthermore, Beard discusses the types
of derivation, namely lexical stock expansion, lexical derivation
-  including featural, functional and expressive derivation --
and transposition. The final section deals with the realisation
and productivity of derivational morphology, presenting a brief
discussion on discontinuous morphemes, some types of stem
modification, such as affixation, apophony, conversion,
paradigmatic derivation, prosodic modification and reduplication,
and the relation between productivity and allomorphic variation.

Article 3: Compounding           Nigel Fabb
Fabb offers a straightforward discussion on compounding. The
first section offers a set of definitions; the general definition
of compounds, endocentric, exocentric and co-ordinate compounds,
the types of compounds -synthetic, incorporation and repetition
compounds- as well as compounds containing "bound words". He then
moves onto discussing the structure of compounds, including
directionality, whether word class is important or lost in
compounds and the subconstituency in complex compounds. Fabb then
turns onto the interpretation of compounds discussing
interpretative gaps in detail. The relation of compounds with
syntax takes place by discussing specific types of compounds in
Mandarin, Hebrew and Japanese in particular. The set of
phonological processes (supresegmental processes, including
stress, phonological processes between the two words, as well as
segment loss) and morphological processes, which might take place
in compounds (such as morphemes in compounds, inflectional and
derivational morphology and clitics), is the final section of
this chapter.

Article 4: Incorporation           Donna B. Gerdts
Gerdts discusses noun incorporation, exploring the syntactic
conditions, its role in clauses (the new word is both the verb
and one of its arguments), the presence of nominals, such as
benefactives, locatives and possesors, in addition to patient,
which may also incorporate. Finally she presents a brief
discussion on similar to noun incorporation phenomena, such as
noun stripping, lexical suffixes and denominal verbs.

Article 5: Clitics           Aaron L. Halpern
Halpern presents a discussion on clitics. He makes a distinction
between the types of clitics -such as simple (accentless words),
verbal, second-position, clitics of Old French and Bulgarian as
well as some clitics found in European Portuguese. In the final
section some theoretical approaches to clitics are revised
(Klavans  (1980, 1985), Marantz (1988), Taylor (1990), Pintzuk
(1991), Sadock (1991), Fontana (1993), Anderson (1992, 1993)).

Article 6: Morphophonological Operations           Andrew Spencer
Spencer examines the morphophonological operations, which take
place in words. He first discusses how the theoretical approaches
-  such as Item-and-Arrangement (IA) and Item- and- Process (IP)
-  attempted to analyse and explain the morphophonological
processes. He then presents a discussion on concatenation for
compounding and affixation, including prefixation, suffixation,
infixation and reduplication, as well as the morphophonemic
processes such as apophony, c-mutation, tone, stress, vowel and
consonant length, metathesis, truncation, subtractive and
replacive morphology, and stem indexing.

Article 7: Phonological Constraints on Morphological Rules
Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy
In this chapter, Carstairs-McCarthy illustrates how phonological
constrains determine morphology. He presents examples from both
derivational and inflectional morphology and he talks about the
phonological restrictions, which leave gaps that might or might
not be filled with morphological material or the gap filling
might or might not be systematic.

Part II - Morphology and Grammar
Article 8: Morphology and Syntax           Hagit Borer
In this chapter, the interaction between morphology and syntax is
examined dealing with two questions specifically; is word
formation an independent module or is it part of the syntax and
if word formation is indeed an independent module, how is the
interaction of the two characterised? The discussion on the
theoretical approaches begins with the linear models (Lapointe
(1980), Di Sciullo and Williams (1987)), followed by the
syntactic ones (Baker (1985), Lieber (1992)). The next sections
make a comparison between morphological and syntactic structures
-  discussing headness, subcategorisation, incorporation and
government -- and word formation and argument structure. Borer
then moves onto a discussion on the existence of
morphophonological and morphosyntactic isomorphism, including
Pollock's (1989) account, Distributed Morphology (DM) (1993), A-
morphous morphology (Anderson (1992)) as well as checking theory
(Chomsky (1993, 1995)). Finally, in the last section, Borer
reviews what are called "mixed" models, proposed by Emonds
(1985), Laka (1990) and Rohrbacker (1994).

Article 9: Morphology and Agreement           Greville G. Corbett
This chapter deals with agreement morphology. Gorbett starts with
a set of definitions (controller, target, domain of agreement)
and he then moves onto the agreement features -gender, number,
person, case and definiteness, which are followed by a brief
presentation of the exponents of agreement as well as the
constraints on the co-occurrence of agreement features. The last
two sections examine the target of agreement, to the extend of
availability and selection.

Article 10: Morphology and Argument Structure
Louisa Sadler and Andrew Spencer
Sadler and Spencer examine the relation between morphology and
argument structure focussing on valency and especially on the
question how two morphologically related predicates differ in the
lexical semantics and their realisation in morphology. They first
distinguish two types of operations affecting valency --
morpholexical versus morphosyntactic. They then move onto the
question of linking within the theoretical frameworks of Lexical
Functional Grammar (LFG) (Bresnan and Kanerva (1989), Bresnan and
Moshi (1990)) and Principles and Parameters Theory (PPT) (Chomsky
(1981)) and they offer a brief mention of Hale and Keyser's
(1992, 1993) as well as Goldberg's (1995) accounts. The final
section is devoted to case studies: passives and middles in
English, reflexives and reciprosals in Bantu, causatives in
Japanese and a discussion on noun incorporation. As they
themselves admit, the discussion is limited to verbs due to space
limitations.

Article 11: Morphology and the Lexicon: Lexicalisation and
Productivity            Mark Aronoff and Frank Anshen
Aronoff and Ashen discuss the relation between morphology and the
lexicon; whether morphology rivals the lexicon or whether it is
based on the lexicon. They then move onto discussing the
morphological productivity -- making a distinction between
quantitative and qualitative productivity, as well as the
relation of productivity with frequency and pragmatics.

Article 12: Morphology and Lexical Semantics
Beth Levin and Malka Rappaport Hovav
This chapter deals with the relation between morphology and
lexical semantics. They first discuss the lexical semantic
representation of verbs making a distinction between the lexical
syntactic representation (argument structure) and the lexical
semantic representation (lexical conceptual structure (LCS) in
terms of Hale and Keyser (1986, 1987)), on which they focus.
Furthermore, they examine how names can be related to lexical
semantic representations. In the last section they discuss verbs,
which have distinct but related lexical conceptual semantics
versus verbs, which share the lexical conceptual semantics but
they have distinct argument structures.

Article 13: Morphology and Pragmatics            Ferenc Kiefer
The last chapter of Part II examines the relation of morphology
to pragmatics. It starts with the definition of morphopragmatics
-  including the notions of speech situation and speech event --
and it then moves onto a discussion of inflectional morphology
and pragmatics. Among the topics discussed are case marking in
Polish, inflectional suffixes in Hungarian, and inflectional
suffixes as indicators of speech event and as honorifics. Next
comes derivational morphology and pragmatics, including the
Japanese beautificational prefix, Australian depreciatives,
Italian diminutives and internsification and the excessive in
Hungarian and Viennese German. This chapter closes with brief
discussions on compounds and clitic particles, such as evidential
and clitics, which function as illocutionary act indicators.

Part III - Theoretical Issues
Article 14: Prosodic Morphology
John J. McCarthy and Alan S. Prince
McCarthy and Prince begin this chapter with the definition of
prosodic morphology and its principles, which are followed by a
section, where prosodic morphology is exemplified. They then move
onto a detailed discussion on Optimality Theory (OT) based on the
work of Prince and Smolensky (1993). They finally briefly discuss
two prospects of Optimality Theory, one related to the ranking
schema, the other to the status of templates in Prosodic
Morphology.

Article 15: Word Syntax            Jindrich Toman
Toman discusses word syntax and especially deals with the
question of whether the principles of grammar can be applied to
word structure. Firstly, the existing theories are revised -such
as lexicalism (Williams (1981), Di Scuillo and Williams (1987)).
Toman then discusses the internal syntax of words, looking at
phrase structure morphology, as well as operations, which take
place on base-generated word structure -such as percolation, case
assignment and operations on argument structure.

Article 16: Paradigmatic Structure: Inflectional Paradigms and
Morphological Classes            Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy
The third chapter in Part III examines the inflectional paradigms
and the morphological classes. It deals with the paradigm
consistency, the morphosyntactic categories, word forms,
syncretism and their internal structures. The last section
discusses the approaches on the organisation of inflectional
classes.

Article 17: Morphology as Component or Module: Mapping Principle
Approaches            Richard Sproat
Sproat discusses two main approaches to morphology in order to
examine whether morphology is a component or a module. He reviews
in detail Sadock's (1991) Autolexical Syntax -- especially
cliticisation and incorporation in Autolexical Syntax -- and he
then moves onto bracketing paradoxes (Pesetsky (1979, 1985)), the
mapping principle (Sproat (1985)) and its consequences.

Part IV - Morphology in a Wider Setting
Article 18: Diachronic Morphology            Brian D. Joseph
Joseph examines diachronic morphology. He discusses five main
questions, namely what can change in morphology, what can not,
where morphology comes from, what triggers change in morphology
and whether a general theory of morphological change is possible.

Article 19: Morphology in Language Acquisition       Eve V. Clark
The discussion on morphology in language acquisition is divided
into three parts. In the first part, an introduction on language
acquisition is offered and some issues are raised, such as the
extent to which language typology affects the process of
acquisition, whether children shift from word-to-word acquisition
of inflection to rule-like application, whether inflection and
word formation are treated in a similar way by children, who
acquire morphology. The next two parts present a review of the
works, which have been dealt with such questions. Clark first
discusses inflectional morphology, looking at what is required,
rote learning, rules and regularisation, case marking, agreement
(person, number and gender as well as agreement between noun
phrases and verbs, demonstratives and nouns), tense and aspect as
well as typology and acquisition. The final part deals with the
acquisition of word formation, focussing on derivational
morphology and compounding.

Article 20: Morphology and Aphasia
William Badecker and Alfonso Caramazza
Badecker and Caramazza present a discussion on acquired
morphological impairments, which could be used for deriving the
properties of the normal processing system. They discuss the
errors of morphological retrieval and composition, whether
composition reflects a primary system or a back-up component,
jargon aphasia and word formation mechanisms, composition and
acquired dysgraphia, the distinction between inflectional versus
derivational morphology by aphasic patients and some
morphological deficits in sentence comprehension and production.

Article 21: Morphology in Word Recognition
James M. McQueen and Anne Cutler
McQueen and Cutler discuss the psycholinguistic literature of
morphology in word recognition and they show how psycholinguistic
morphology does not entirely map with linguistic morphology. They
first review the different models of representation -such as Taft
(1988), the Augmented Addressed Morphology (AAM) model by
Caramazza (1988), Feldman and Fowler (1987), Schriefers et al
(1992). Then they move onto discussing the pre-lexical processing
of morphological structure both in inflectional and derivational
morphology. Finally, their discussion ends with a detailed
mention to one of the most important factors in pre-lexical
processing namely the frequency of occurrence.

Article 22: Morphology in Language Production with Special
Reference to Connectionism            Joseph Paul Stemberger
Stemberger discusses the morphology in language production with
special reference to connectionism. He presents a set of
empirical work on language production, which he divides into
right features at the right place, right features at the wrong
place, allomorphy, derivational morphology and compounding.
Furthermore, he offers a summary of the models in language
production, which deal with morphology. He starts with the rule-
based models (Fromkin (1971), Cutler (1980), Garrett (1975,
1976), Pinker (1991) and others), followed by the connectionist
ones (McClelland and Rumelhart (1981), Dell (1986)), which are of
two types: local connectionist models proposed by Rumelhart and
McClelland (1981), Dell (1986, 1990), Stemberger (1985), and
distributed connectionist models, which can be further subdivided
into nonreccurent networks (McClelland and Rumelhart (1986),
Pinker and Prince (1988)) and recurrent networks (Corina (1991),
Dell (1993)).

Part V - Morphological Sketches of Individual Languages
Article 23: Archi (Caucasian - Daghestanian)
Aleksandr E. Kibrik
Kibrik begins the discussion of Archi by providing a short
"biographical sketch" of the language, making clear that
morphological phenomena, which reflect the general principles of
this language, as well as unusual morphological categories from a
typological point of view such as commentative, admirative, and
double case marking in the possessive locative, are explored. The
verbal inflection (finite, non-finite forms and the size of the
verb paradigms) is first discussed. The second part of this
analysis focuses on the nominal inflection, where a general model
for noun paradigms is given in addition to the grammatical cases,
the spatial forms and finally the possessive locative. A list of
the abbreviations, which are used in this chapter, is also
included.

Article 24: Celtic (Indo-European)
James Fife and Gareth King
In this chapter Fife and King discuss some common morphological
features, which are shared by the Celtic languages, both the
Goidelic (Irish, Scots Gaeli, Manx) and the Brythonic (Welsh,
Breton, Cornish), such as mutation, conjugated prepositions,
vowel gradation and determiner clitics, but at the same time
differ from the Indo-European and universal ones. They then turn
to the morphological devices in Goidelic in particular: palatal,
non-palatal morphophonemic opposition in noun declension, the
comparison of the adjective, the formation of derived nouns and
the root of the verb, verb infixes and the pronominal
contrastive-emphatic suffixes. On the other hand, the
morphological devices in Brythonic -- equative adjectives and
pronominal agreement clitics -- are discussed in the last section
of this chapter.

Article 25: Chichewa (Bantu)            Sam A. Mchombo
The discussion on Chichewa begins with a brief reference to the
characteristics of this language. The structure of the verbs is
first examined, to which is added a discussion of the causative
and applicative suffixes, both instrumental and locative,
passive, stative, reciprocal and reversive constructions. In
addition, a short presentation of reduplication in Chichewa is
offered. In the last sections nominal derivation, compounding as
well as the classification of nouns are presented.

Article 26: Chukchee (Paleo-Siberian)
Irina A. Muravyova
After a short description of the language, a set of phonological
and morphophonological properties, which are found, is given. The
main discussion is divided into two sections: inflectional and
derivational morphology. Nouns (including case-number, person-
number marking and noun incorporation), participles, adjectives -
(including general remarks, followed by case-number marking,
adjective incorporation and degrees of comparison), pronouns
(personal, possessive, interrogative and demonstrative),
numerals, verbs (finite, non-finite forms and verb
incorporation), adverbs, and postpositions are discussed. Finally
the derivational morphology, nouns, verbs and compounds are
briefly sketched.

Article 27: Hua (Papuan)            John Haiman
Haiman offers a short biographical sketch of Hua. He then moves
onto discussing nominal morphology and in specific the citation
suffix, the possessive and case suffixes, the personal pronouns,
the possessive prefixes, number marking and finally the potential
topic marker. As far as verbal morphology is concerned, the
ablaut rules, the medial verbs, the relative clauses,
conditionals, the inconsequential as well as modality are
examined. He finally briefly presents the systematic infixation
in Hua.

Article 28: Malagasy (Austonesian)
Edward L. Keenan and Maria Polinsky
Keenan and Polinsky begin with a brief background discussion of
Malagasy with special reference to its phonological system. The
main discussion is introduced by a general discussion on
inflectional and derivation morphology, which then becomes more
explicit. Noun-base morphology, including nominal expressions
such as genitive formation, and pronominal genitives are
presented. In verbal morphology, passive verbs (including root
passives, suffix passives, prefix passives and infix passives),
active verbs (primary active verbs, imperatives and secondary
prefixes), and circumstantial verbal forms are discussed.
Finally, a detailed discussion on verbal nominalisations and
generalised incorporation is offered.

Article 29: Qafar (East Cushitic)            Richard J. Hayward
As in the previous chapters, Hayward first offers some background
information about East Cushitic. He discusses nominals,
specifically nouns (gender, number, plural, gender and agreement,
case), dependent nominals, pronouns, and numerals. The discussion
of verbs focuses on the inflectional classes, derivation, the
inflectional categories (aspect, mood, tense, modal and lexical
base forms), as well as negation and focus. Nominalisations and
indeclinables, such as determiners, particles and clitics, are
briefly sketched.

Article 30: Slave (Northern Athapaskan)            Keren Rice
The discussion on Slave, a northern Athapaskan language, begins
with nouns, the background of which is offered in order to
introduce a series of problems: a boundaries problem in the
distribution of stem-initial fricatives, a structural problem in
the marked distribution of fricatives in compounds and an
ordering problem in diminutive-augmentative morphemes in
possessive constructions. As far as verbal morphology is
concerned, someone also has to deal with a great number of
problems, which Rice investigates. Ordering problems in the
ordering of inflection and derivation, in the need for a template
for the conjunct morphemes, a structural problem in the structure
of inflectional complex, a duplication problem in two subject
positions, a locality problem in discontinuous constituents and
finally an isomorphism problem in deriving the phonological
structures.

Article 31: Wari' (Amazonian)            Daniel L. Everett
Everett starts with an overview of the phonology and syntax of
Wari and he then moves onto its morphology, as far as word
classes and inflectional and derivation morphology are concerned:
nouns, pronouns, verbs, prepositions, inflectional clitics,
particles, inflectional morphemes, compounds and ideophones.

Article 32: Warumungu (Australian - Pama-Nyungan)    Jane Simpson
Simpson, after providing the background on Warumungu, presents
the phonological inventory and processes of this language. She
then moves onto discussing word formation in terms of compounding
(noun and preverb verb), suffixation (noun and verb inflection
and derivation), reduplication and pronouns.

CRITICAL EVALUATION
This rich collection of thirty-two distinct topics on morphology
varies from purely morphological and theoretical issues to
discussions of the morphology of specific languages, the
interface of morphology with other areas of grammar, the
acquisition of morphology, and morphology and language disorders.
For those who are unfamiliar with the fundamentals of morphology,
its principles, and the massive amount of background literature
and its applicability in such a wide range of areas, a global
understanding is provided. It is also time saving, as it
summarises the main points of many theories, and provides
extensive discussion of others. For those readers, who are
acquainted with morphology, this book is not only an excellent
and reliable guide for reference but also challenging, as it
raises issues and leaves open questions for further and future
investigation and analysis. As Geert Booij suggests, this book
"will serve as a guide for graduate students in linguistics, and
for all those researchers who need a reliable survey of current
issues and insights in morphology".

As a whole, the book is well-organised, coherent and user-
friendly. Its division into five main parts, according to their
general topic, is precise and successful. The readers are given a
clear image of the subject of each of the topics before even
reading the introduction of the editors. In addition, the
chapters are organised in such a way, where cross-references to
discussions in previous ones is possible avoiding repetition.
Given the constrains and the referential nature of the book, it
would inappropriate for me to further discuss areas, such as
morphosemantics, at this point.

The list of contributors, including the departments and the
institutes, is provided, even though it might have also been
useful if the email and/or the mailing addresses were given.

A detailed table of abbreviations which are used throughout the
book is provided, and individual chapters include lists of those
that are exclusive to them.

The editors' introduction not only highlights the importance of
morphology and presents a general discussion on the issues, which
will be touched in the main parts, but it is also constructed in
such an effective way, so that it raises the interest and the
reader looks forward to moving onto the main discussion. The
provision of the features, which are identified by the discussion
of the specific languages, is useful.

As far as the chapters of the book are concerned, the authors
begin with an introduction of what each chapter is about and the
nature or the specific questions, with which will be dealt.
Furthermore, they start with elementary discussions on each of
the topics without taking anything for granted, which then
elaborate gradually, so they are easy to follow. I think that the
length of the chapters is also appropriate. The authors are given
the space to clearly present such a great deal of individual
areas, theoretical approaches and constructions without the
discussion being tiring or confusing. Even though they are forced
in some cases to simply name and exemplify the constructions or
theories in question, this is something they themselves admit and
make clear. In all cases, they provide critical evaluations --
regardless of whether these are brief or not- of the theoretical
approaches and also refer the readers to relevant works for an
extensive discussion. Reference to the rest of the chapters is
also regular. Finally, both the empirical and the theoretical
issues are fully exemplified by rich data.

As far as the last part of the book is concerned, bearing in mind
that the intentions of the authors are simply to present some of
the interesting constructions in each of these languages, I think
that they are good reference guides. Moreover, it would be nice
to see the morphology of these languages being allocated and
analysed within specific theoretical frameworks in greater detail
in future works.

Finally, the references, the subject and author indexes are
extremely detailed and useful. The references, which have been
used throughout the books, are all cited. The reader will find
the author and especially the subject indexes very handy, as all
the phenomena, constructions and theoretical frameworks, which
have been discussed in each of the chapters, are all given at the
end of the book.

CONCLUSION
The Handbook of Morphology is convincingly challenging, high in
the quality and interest of each chapter and complete in the
sense that it addresses all the questions, it was designed for.
It is a good reference book.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anderson, S.R. (1977). On the formal description of inflection.
In Papers from the 13th annual regional meeting of the Chicago
Linguistic Society, 15-44.

- -- (1992). A-Morphous Morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

- -- (1993). Wackernagel's revenge: clitics, morphology and the
syntax of second position. Language, 69, 68-98.

Aronoff, M. (1976). Word formation in generative grammar.
Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press.

- -- (1994). Morphology by itself. Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press.

Baker, M. (1985). The mirror principle and morphosyntactic
explanation. Linguistic Inquiry, 16, 373-416.

Bierwisch, M. (1967). Syntactic features in morphology: general
problems of so-called pronominal inflection in German. In To
honoun Roman Jakobson: essays on the occasion of his seventieth
birthday, The Hague: Mouton, 239- 270.

Bresnan, J. and Kanerva, J.M. (1989). Locative inversion in
Chichewa: a case study of factorization in grammar. Linguistic
Inquiry, 20, 1-50.

Bresnan, J. and Moshi, L. (1990). Object asymmetries in
comparative Bantu syntax. Linguistic Inquiry, 21, 147-185; also
in S.A. Mchombo (ed), 1993b, 47-91.

Bybee, J. (1988). Morphology as lexical organisation. In Hammond
and Nooman (eds), 119-41.

Caramazza, A., Laudanna, G. and Romani, C. (1988). Lexical access
and inflectional morphology. Cognition, 28, 297-332.

Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on government and binding.
Dordrecht: Foris.

- -- (1993). A minimalist program in linguistic theory. In Hale
and Keyser (eds), 1-37.

- -- (1995). The minimalist program. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Corina, D.P. (1991). Towards an understanding of the syllable:
evidence form linguistic, psychological, and connectionist
investigations of syllable structure. Pd.D. diss., University of
California at San Diego.

Cutler, A. (1980). Errors of stress and intonation. In V.A.
Fromkin (ed.), Errors in linguistic performance, New York:
Academic Press.

Dell, G.S. (1986). A spreading activation theory of retrieval in
sentence production. Psychological Review, 93, 283-321.

- -- (1990). Effects of frequency and vocabulary type on
phonological speech errors. Language and Cognitive Processes, 5,
313-349.

Dell, G. S., Juliano, C. and Govidjee, A. (1993). Structure and
content in language production: a theory of frame constraints in
phonological speech errors. Cognitive Science, 17, 149-195.

Di Scuillo, A. M. and Williams, E. (1987). On the definition of
word. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Emonds, J. (1985). A unified theory of syntactic categories.
Dordrecht: Foris.

Feldman, L. B. and Fowler, C.A. (1987). The inflection noun
system in Serbo-Croatian: lexical representation of morphological
structure. Memory and Cognition, 15, 1-12.

Fontana, J. M. (1993). Phrase structure and the syntax of clitics
in the history of Spanish. Unpublished Ph.D. diss., University of
Pennsylvania.

Fromkin, V. A. (1971). The non-anomalous nature of anomalous
utterances. Language, 47, 27-52.

Garrett, M. F. (1975). The analysis of sentence production. In G.
Bower (ed.), psychology of learning and motivation, vol.9, New
York: Academic Press, 133-177.

Garrett, M. F. (!976). Syntactic processes in language
production. In R.J. Wales and E. Walker (ed), New approaches to
language mechanisms, Amsterdam: North Holland, 231-256.

Goldberg, A. (1995). Constructions. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.

Hale, K. and Keyser, S.J. (1986). Some transitivity alternations
in English, Lexicon Project Working Papers, 7. Cambridge, Mass.:
Center for Cognitive Science, MIT.

- -- (1987). A view from the middle. Lexicon Project Working
Papers, 10. Cambridge, Mass.: Center for Cognitive Science, MIT.

- -- (1992). The syntactic character of thematic structure. In
Roca (ed.), 107-143.

- -- (1993). On argument structure and the lexical expression of
syntactic relations. In Hale and Kayser (eds), 53-110.

Halle, M. and Marantz, A. (1993). Distributed morphology and the
pieces of inflection. In Hale and Keyser (eds), 111-176.

Jackendoff, R. S. (1975). Morphological and semantic regularities
in the lexicon. Language, 51, 639-671.

Joseph, B. D. and Smirnitopoulos, J. (1993). The morphosyntax of
the Modern Greek verb as morphology and not syntax. Lingustic
Inquiry, 24, 388-398.

Kiefer, F. (1973). Generative morphologie der Neufranzosischen.
Tubengen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.

Klavans, J. (1980). Some problems in a theory of clitics. Ph.D.
diss., University College London. (Distributed 1982 by IUCL,
Bloomington, Ind.)

Klavans, J. (1985). The independence of syntax and phonology in
cliticisation. Language, 61, 95- 120.

Laka, I. (1990). Negation in syntax: on the nature of functional
categories and projections. Ph.D. diss., Massachusetts Institute
of Technology.

Lapointe, S. G. (1980). A theory of grammatical agreement. Ph.D.
diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Lieber, R. (1992). Deconstructing morphology: word formation in
syntactic theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Marantz, A. (1988). Clitics, morphological merger and the mapping
to phonological structure. In Hammond and Nooman (eds), 253-270.

Matthews, P.H. (1972). Morphology. 1st edn. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

McClelland, J. L. and Rumelhart, D. E. (1981). An interactive
activation model of context effects in letter cognition: part 1.
An account of basic findings. Psychological Review, 88, 375-401.

Pesetsky, D. (1979). Russian morphology and lexical theory. MS,
MIT.

- -- (1985). Morphology and logical form. Linguistic Inquiry, 16,
193-246.

Pinker, S. and Prince, A. (1988). On language and connectionism:
analysis of a parallel distributed processing model of language
acquisition. Cognition, 28, 73-194.

Pintzul, S. (1991). Phrase structures in competition: variation
and change in Old English word order. Pd.D. diss., University of
Pennsylvania.

Pollock, J.-Y. (1989). Verb movement, universal grammar and the
structure of IP. Linguistic Inquiry, 20, 365-424.

Prince, A. and Smolensky, P. (1991). Notes on connectionism and
harmony theory in linguistics. Technical report CU-CS-533-91,
Boulder: Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado.

Rivero, M.L. (1990). The location of nonactive voice in Albanian
and Modern Greek. Linguistic Inquiry, 21, 135-146.

Rohrbacher, B. (1994). The Germanic VO languages and the full
paradigm: a theory of V to I raising. Ph.D. diss., University of
Massachusetts, Amherst.

Rumelhart, D. and McClelland, J. (1986). On learning the past
tenses of English verbs. In D. Rumelhart and J. McClelland (eds),
Parallel distributed processing: explorations in the
microstructure of cognition, vol.1, Cambridge, Mass.: Bransford
Books, 216-271.

Sadock, J.M. (1991). Autolexical Syntax: a theory of parallel
grammatical representations. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.

Schriefers, H., Friederici, A. and Graetz, P. (1992).
Inflectional and derivational morphology in the mental lexicon:
symmetries and asymmetries in repetition priming. Quarterly
journal of experimental psychology, 44A, 373-290.

Selkirk, E. O. (1982). The syntax of words. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press.

Siegel, D. (1979). The adjacency constraint and the theory of
morphology. In Proceedings of the 8th annual meeting of the
North-Eastern Linguistic Society. 189-197.

Sproat, R. (1985). On deriving the lexicon. Ph.D. diss.,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Stemberger, J.P. (1985). An interactive activation model of
language production. In A. Ellis (ed.), Progress in the
psychology of language, vol.1, London: Lawrence Erlbaum, 143-186.

Taft, M. (1988). A morphological-decomposition model of lexical
representation. Linguistics, 26, 657-667.

Taylor, A. (1990). Clitics and configurationality in Ancient
Greek. Unpublished Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania.

Warburton, I. P. (1973). Modern Greek verb conjugation:
inflectional morphology in a transformational grammar. Lingua,
32, 193-226.

Williams, E. (1981). Argument structure and morphology.
Linguistic Review, 1, 81-114.

Williams, E. (1981). On the notions "lexically related" and "head
of a word". Linguistic Inquiry, 12, 245-274.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Alexandra Galani is a Ph. D. student working on the morphosyntax
and the semantics of tense and aspect in Modern Greek at the
University of York.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you buy this book please tell the publisher or author
that you saw it reviewed on the LINGUIST list.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-12-3096



More information about the LINGUIST mailing list