Reviewed by Julie M. Winter, Gonzaga University
The most striking feature of this book is the author’s tone. Lieber sounds as though she is directly addressing her students in a classroom. Explanations of topics are easy to understand and accessible without being oversimplified. The tone of the text assumes that students are interested in the topic and are intelligent, careful readers exploring an area that is new to them.
In keeping with the author’s tone are some additions useful in an introductory morphology text. Each chapter includes one or more ‘challenge’ boxes, or exercises, addressing a point just explained in the text. These exercises give students the opportunity to ‘take a breather from reading or class lecture and try something out for themselves’ (x) and can be used in class discussion, group work, or as homework assignments.
Other valuable features are the chapter outlines at the beginning of each chapter and the summaries at the end. Clear drawings and diagrams illustrate main points throughout the text. Each chapter also contains a good selection of exercises at the end (in addition to the ‘challenge’ boxes) to allow students to practice morphology on their own. This is in keeping with the author’s goal of making morphology accessible and hands-on for students. The nature of the exercises could allow for lively discussions in class after students have individually completed them. For example, in the chapter ‘Words, dictionaries, and the mental lexicon’, students are asked to carry out searches in the online Oxford English dictionary, and to visit the Word Spy website to look at new words to see whether they use these words themselves and whether they agree with the definitions.
The chapter on dictionaries nicely illustrates how the author’s experience teaching morphology influences the text. She finds that students generally experience some interference when thinking about word formation and the mental lexicon; it is therefore advantageous to devote time to dictionaries to help students distinguish the formal record-keeping function of dictionaries from the human ability to organize and formulate words in the mind and understand that there are morphological rules underlying them.
Several chapters include ‘How to’ sections that take students through the process of analyzing morphological data step by step, and an excellent glossary of linguistic terms rounds out the book. Furthermore, data from languages other than English is included to aid students in understanding the universality of morphological rules.
Finally, the author saves morphological theory until the last chapter so that students first gain a firm footing in morphological rules before embarking on theoretical concerns, a reasonable approach in an introduction to morphology. All in all, this is a comprehensive, informative, and well-written introductory level text with a great deal of hands-on material to make morphology come alive.