Reviewed by Anelia S. Ignatova, Polytechnic University of Madrid

This revised edition of Understanding morphology reaffirms the success of the first edition. It provides an introduction to linguistic morphology, bringing issues of morphological theories to the forefront. The book consists of twelve chapters, each followed by a summary, further reading, comprehension exercises, and exploratory exercises (extended). An extended glossary, a language index (104 languages), and a subject index are also included. This organization shows the authors’ methodological concern with providing students with basic concepts, a diversity of word formation patterns, and plenty of useful and necessary tools for analysis of either English morphology or the morphology of languages other than English.

 The first two chapters deal with analytic and (poly)synthetic languages, which are distinguished within a continuum. The goals of morphological research are explained, and two definitions of morphology are provided. Technical terms are introduced gradually. Ch. 3 concerns a system of morphological rules, based on concatenative/non-concatenative morphological patterns. Two alternative models of rule structuring are also presented: the morpheme-based model, where morphological structure is treated as a string of morphemes, analogous to syntactic strings of words; and the word-based model, which represents the features common to morphologically related words in word-schemas.

 The potential problems of a morpheme lexicon and a strict word-form lexicon are covered in Ch. 4. Word-forms and morphemes are ‘reconciled’ in a moderate word-form lexicon, where a lexical entry is not a morpheme but a morphological pattern, a generalization based on word-forms in the lexicon. An example from Russian involves word lexical entries of complex lexemes and word-schema lexical entries of morphemes (e.g. suffixes and roots).

 The overall goal of Ch. 5 is to determine whether inflection and derivation should represent two distinct systems in morphological architecture. The dichotomy and the continuum approaches are juxtaposed for that purpose. As in these two approaches the syntax-morphology interface is affected in a very different way, there is little agreement among linguists about this distinction. However, ‘a number of empirical issues argue against split morphology’ (107). Ch. 6 treats productivity as part of speakers’ competence rather than exclusively as part of their performance.

 Syntax-morphology interface issues (Chs. 7 and 11) and phonological vs. morphological/ lexical conditioning (Ch. 10) are developed in line with the latest linguistic research and will contribute to students’ natural involvement with theoretical issues. Ch. 8 emphasizes the importance of the balance between syntagmatic and paradigmatic description of inflectional structure for the description of morphological structure. The lexical integrity hypothesis is introduced in Ch. 9. Compounds, free forms, and clitics are opposed to phrases, bound forms, and affixes, respectively. Ch. 12 concerns frequency effects in morphology.

 This book is of great value not only to students of morphology but also to linguists in general, as it provides excellent guidelines to the research of morphology, a discipline which is considered ‘inherently messy’. The authors’ expertise in the subject, their honest concern about the future of the discipline, and its proper place within linguistics make the book an indispensable academic tool.