Reviewed by Dimitrios Ntelitheos, United Arab Emirates University

This book is a collection of selected articles presented at the York-Essex Morphology Meeting at the Universities of York and Essex during 2006–2007. The book starts with an introduction by the editors and is divided into three parts, the first exploring the interface of morphology with phonology and syntax, the second with semantics and the lexicon, and the third part with psycholinguistic and developmental aspects.

In Part 1, Vassilios Spyropoulos explores the morphology-phonology interface with a discussion of case conflict in Greek free relatives, implementing a decompositional approach to case assignment. Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero and John Payne discuss the status of special clitics, arguing against theories that assign them phrasal-affix status. Ana R. Luís and Ryo Otoguro continue the discussion of clitics in European Portuguese within the framework of lexical-functional grammar. They explain the affixal properties of preverbal clitics as the result of the interaction of a morphological component and a syntactic component. Melanie J. Bell shifts the discussion to compound formation in English, showing that tests of phrasehood, such as stress assignment and lexical integrity, are unreliable and that a unified morphological analysis of all noun-noun compounds provides a more adequate analysis of their formation.

Part 2 starts with a discussion of tense features by Anna Kibort. Based on evidence from Kayardild tense marking, she shows that all morphological instances of tense are morphosemantic and that syntax is not sensitive to the tense value of the verb. Artemis Alexiadou discusses the aspectual properties Greek deverbal nominals, showing that certain nominals are interpreted as atelic and, thus, resist pluralization. Despina Kazana continues with Greek data, discussing determiner scope over noun phrase coordination within the framework of lexical-functional grammar. Kersti Börjars and Nigel Vincent discuss suppletion, the emergence of a new morphological paradigm from two pre-existing paradigms, which they show may be driven by semantic principles, based on data from Scandinavian modification. The second part of the book closes with a discussion of Archi morphology from a lexicographic perspective, by Marina Chumakina. She illustrates the development of an electronic dictionary of Archi, discussing problems associated with the lexicographic investigation of morphologically rich languages of this type.

Part 3 begins with a study of second-language clitic acquisition in Spanish by English learners. Maria J. Arche and Laura Domínguez examine the relationship between syntax and morphology by evaluating two acquisition hypotheses: the impaired representation hypothesis and the missing surface inflection hypothesis. They argue for an unimpaired narrow syntactic component, assuming that inflectional variability is caused by a deficit in phonetic form (PF) mapping. In the final article of the book, Spyridoula Varlokosta discusses the role of morphology in Greek grammatical gender assignment. She tests gender assignment to novel nouns by native speakers and concludes that formal gender-assignment rules determine marking to a great extent.

This collection is an important contribution to the current discussion of the status of morphology within grammatical components. It is essential reading for morphologists and other theoretical linguists, and for students interested in how the morphological component interacts with other linguistic components and to what extent morphological theory informs certain debates on the derivation and interpretation of linguistic strings.