Beyond Morphology: Interface Conditions on Word Formation

This book provides a compelling argument for a radically modular view of the human language faculty. It does so on the basis of the most comprehensive study to date of how word formation is constrained by different components of the grammar. Peter Ackema and Ad Neeleman argue that complex words are generated by a dedicated rule system which interacts with the syntax on the one hand and the phonology on the other. Their detailed analysis of these interactions explains numerous observations, many of them new.

The phenomena discussed by the authors range from synthetic compounding in English to agreement alternations in Arabic and complementizer agreement in dialects of Dutch. Their exposition combines insights from lexicalism and distributed morphology, and is expressed in terms accessible to scholars and advanced students.

- unique exploration of interfaces of morphology with syntax and phonology
- wide empirical scope with many new observations
- theoretically innovative and important
- accessible to students with chapters designed for use in teaching

Peter Ackema is Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. He has worked extensively on issues regarding the morphology-syntax interface, on which he has published a book (Issues in Morphosyntax, 1999) as well as numerous articles. he has also published on a wide range of syntax-internal and morphology-internal topics, in such journals as Linguistic Inquiry, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory and Yearbook of Morphology. Ad Neeleman is Reader in Linguistics at University College London. His main research interests are case theory, the syntactic encoding of thematic dependencies, and the interaction between the syntax and syntax-external systems. Earlier works include Complex Predicates (1993), Flexible Syntax (1999, with Fred Weerman), and a number of articles in such journals as Linguistic Inquiry, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory and Yearbook of Morphology.