The study of morphology keeps on changing. There are basics that every student linguist must learn, but for all linguists – student and grown-up alike – there are always new challenges, new ideas, new ways of finding data. Textbooks that stay the same for too long therefore run the risk of falling behind the times. Hence, the need for a second edition. This edition is not radically different from the previous one, but I have made some significant additions. Most importantly, I have introduced the use of corpora as tools for gathering data. Chapter 3 introduces students to gathering data from corpora such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the British National Corpus (BNC) and to formulating hypotheses on the basis of their own data. Exercises throughout the book now make reference to corpus data. I have also added some ‘How to’ sections, as well as new Challenge boxes within chapters. I have added material on the interaction of affixation, compounding, and conversion (Chapter 3), subtractive processes (Chapter 5), evidentiality (Chapter 6), typological change (Chapter 7), periphrastic versus morphological expression (Chapter 8), and syllable structure in morphology (Chapter 9). Exercises and additional examples have been added throughout.

I wish to thank several anonymous Cambridge University Press reviewers for comments both before and after I wrote this edition, as well as Andrew Winnard for his support throughout. I especially want to thank students in the Fall 2012 section of my morphology class for their great word log words and the students in the Fall 2014 section for serving as guinea pigs, finding typos, and generally letting me know what needed to be fixed. You guys are the best!

One of the things that drew me to linguistics several decades ago was a sense of wonder at both the superficial diversity and the underlying commonality of languages. My wonder arose in the process of working through my first few problem sets in linguistics, not surprisingly, problem sets that involved morphological analysis. What I learned first was not theory – indeed at that moment in linguistic history morphology was not perceived as a separate theoretical area in the US – but what languages were like, how to analyze data, and what to call things. I love morphological theory, but for drawing beginning students into the field of linguistics, I believe that there is no substitute for hands-on learning, and that is where this book starts.

This book is intended for undergraduate students who may have had no more than an introductory course in linguistics. It assumes that students know the International Phonetic Alphabet, and have a general idea of what linguistic rules are, but it presupposes little else in the way of sophistication or technical knowledge. It obviously assumes that students are English-speakers, and therefore the first few chapters concentrate on English, and to some extent on languages that are likely to be familiar to linguistics students from language study in high school and university. As the book progresses, I introduce data from many languages that will be “exotic” to students, so that by the end of the book, they will have some sense of linguistic diversity, at least with respect to types of morphology.

There are some aspects of the content of this text that might seem unusual to instructors. The first is the attention to dictionaries in Chapter 2. Generally, texts on linguistic morphology do not mention dictionaries, but I find that beginning students of morphology retain a reverence for dictionaries that sometimes gets in the way of thinking about the nature of the mental lexicon and how word formation works. Instructors can skip all or part of this chapter, but my experience is that it sets students on a good footing from the start, and largely eliminates their squeamishness about considering whether incent or bovineness or organizationalize or the like are ‘real’ words, even if we can't find them in the dictionary.

What, then, has been learned in this study about the universal principles of case assignment, and the parameters that characterize how languages vary in this domain? In order to summarize what I have said about these matters, I begin by bringing together the main factors that have been identified and putting them in quasi-sequential order – the order that they apply in within a syntactic derivation, as those are normally conceived within the generative paradigm. I do this as a way of reviewing the most important points of what has already been said, but also to add some value by arranging them in a somewhat different way. Indeed, a few new points arise concerning theoretical issues that become more evident when the pieces are put together in this way. I then close by emphasizing once more a recurring theme of this book: that the same factors shape how case assignment works across languages with a wide range of different alignment types. This testifies to the deep unity of human language, discernable underneath the surface diversity of case patterns.

The role of basic syntactic structure

First of all, syntactic structure is constructed in the usual way, with nominals (NPs or DPs) merged with verbs (V), verbal operators (v, Appl), and other argument-taking elements in ways that express their thematic relations.

Over the last two chapters, I have been fleshing out the schema for dependent case assignment in (1) and exploring its parametric possibilities for accounting for crosslinguistic variation.

(1) If a category XP bears c-command relationship R to another category ZP in domain W, then assign Case C to XP.

So far we have investigated the range of relevant c-command relationships R, and the types of domains W, the latter being essentially the spell out domains implied by the theory of phases. The third major dimension to consider is exactly what XP (the case receiver) and ZP (the case competitor) must be in order for them to interact case-theoretically. The core notion that I have assumed throughout is that XP and ZP are overt nominals – NPs and DPs. These are the quintessential argumental categories in natural languages. Moreover, thinking in terms of Comrie's (1978: 181, 1981a) notion of the discriminating role of structural case, they are the main things that a clause often has more than one of, such that it is useful to have morphological marks that distinguish them. It therefore stands to reason that dependent case marking applies to DPs and NPs in a language, if it applies to anything at all. But what exactly is a “nominal,” and is it the same thing in all languages? There is some vagueness here, and with it some room for crosslinguistic variation.