What is morphology? (review)

With the ongoing reestablishment of morphology as an autonomous part of core curricula in many linguistics departments and programs around the world, there is a growing need for up-to-date, introductory-level teaching materials in this area. The appearance of Mark Aronoff and Kirsten Fudeman’s textbook What is morphology? (hereafter WiM) is a welcome contribution to the satisfaction of this need. Intended for students with only minimal prior experience in linguistics, WiM covers a substantial range of morphological topics; throughout, the authors’ discussion is at once highly accessible and closely attentive to current issues and methodologies.

An innovative feature of this book is its systematic use of detailed data from a single language to exemplify the various morphological phenomena under discussion: thus, each chapter but the last concludes with a discussion of some aspect of the morphology of Kujamaat Jóola (a West Atlantic language of Senegal), viewed in light of the issues on which that chapter focuses. The Kujamaat Jóola sections are based mainly on J. David Sapir’s A grammar of Diola-Fogny (1965), Thomas & Sapir 1967, and Sapir’s unpublished dictionary; cumulatively, these sections provide a thorough overview of the morphology of the language.

The incorporation of the sections on Kujamaat Jóola adds considerably to the book’s value as a new introduction to morphology. English has inevitably remained the world’s favorite object language in syntax textbooks, but in view of the wide typological diversity of the world’s morphological systems, a comparably anglocentric focus simply is not a credible option for an introduction to the field of morphology. More so than any competing textbook, WiM allows students to investigate the workings of a morphological system very different from that of English—not just in the context of a single problem set based on highly edited data, but as part of a discussion that continues to unfold throughout the book.

Some might question the choice of Kujamaat Jóola as an illustrative language on the grounds that its morphology is quite agglutinative; some might have preferred the use of a more heavily fusional language—one whose properties could, for instance, have been used to demonstrate the inadequacy of morpheme-based theories of word structure. But in general, WiM is not intended as an elucidation and evaluation of competing theories of morphology; rather, it is strongly descriptive in orientation, focusing on the variety of morphological phenomena and on the first principles of morphological analysis. For this reason, it is hard to fault the authors’ choice of Kujamaat Jóola as their recurring exemplar: by virtue of both the complexity and the regularity of its morphology, it is richly suited to the purpose that it is called on to fulfill here. One can only hope that other languages will find their way to the center of discussion in textbooks following A&F’s model.

In Ch. 1 (‘Thinking about morphology and morphological analysis’), the authors introduce the notion of morpheme and discuss the linguistic significance of everyday morphological behavior. They elucidate a number of basic assumptions about morphology and discuss four analytic principles whose use they exemplify in a discussion of two morphemic analysis problems (Aztec, French). In the concluding section on Kujamaat Jóola, they present some preliminary information about the language, focusing mainly on its phonology.

In Ch. 2 (‘Words and lexemes’), the authors examine the different senses of ‘word’ and the practical criteria for distinguishing words from other sorts of expressions. They present a preliminary account of the distinction between inflection and derivation (a topic taken up in greater depth in Ch. 6) and exemplify the distinction between item-and-arrangement and item-and-process approaches to morphological description. Their short, sensible discussion of the lexicon demonstrates the erroneousness of two remarkably persistent assumptions: those representing the lexicon as a morpheme inventory or equating it with the morphological component itself. The section on Kujamaat Jóola is devoted to a detailed account of its noun-class system.

Ch. 3 (‘Morphology...