The papers collected in this volume explore and discuss the major mechanisms, that is derivations and constraints, claimed to be responsible for various aspects of the linguistic systems, their syntax, phonology and morphology. The analyzed phenomena come from such languages as English, Old English, Polish, Russian, Hungarian and Icelandic.

The Cambridge Handbook of Morphology describes the diversity of morphological phenomena in the world's languages, surveying the methodologies by which these phenomena are investigated and the theoretical interpretations that have been proposed to explain them. The Handbook provides morphologists with a comprehensive account of the interlocking issues and hypotheses that drive research in morphology; for linguists generally, it presents current thought on the interface of morphology with other grammatical components and on the significance of morphology for understanding language change and the psychology of language; for students of linguistics, it is a guide to the present-day landscape of morphological science and to the advances that have brought it to its current state; and for readers in other fields (psychology, philosophy, computer science, and others), it reveals just how much we know about systematic relations of form to content in a language's words - and how much we have yet to learn.

This volume collects novel contributions to comparative generative linguistics that “rethink” existing approaches to an extensive range of phenomena, domains, and architectural questions in linguistic theory. At the heart of the contributions is the tension between descriptive and explanatory adequacy which has long animated generative linguistics and which continues to grow thanks to the increasing amount and diversity of data available to us. The chapters address research questions in comparative morphosyntax, including the modelling of syntactic categories, relative clauses, and demonstrative systems. Many of these contributions show the influence of research by Ian Roberts and collaborators and give the reader a sense of the lively nature of current discussion of topics in morphosyntax and morphosyntactic variation. This book is complemented by volume I available at https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/275 and volume III available at https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/277.

This book reviews the history of the interface between morpho-syntax and phonology roughly since World War II. Structuralist and generative interface thinking is presented chronologically, but also theory by theory from the point of view of a historically interested observer who however in the last third of the book distills lessons in order to assess present-day interface theories, and to establish a catalogue of properties that a correct interface theory should or must not have. The book also introduces modularity, the rationalist theory of the (human) cognitive system that underlies the generative approach to language, from a Cognitive Science perspective. Modularity is used as a referee for interface theories in the book. Finally, the book locates the interface debate in the landscape of current minimalist syntax and phase theory and fosters intermodular argumentation: how can we use properties of morpho-syntactic theory in order to argue for or against competing theories of phonology (and vice-versa)?

The papers collected in this volume apply principles of phonology and morphology to the Germanic languages. Phonological phenomena range from subsegmental over phonemic to prosodic units (as syllables, pitch accent, stress). Morphology includes properties of roots, derivation, inflection, and words. The analyses deal with language-internal and comparative aspects, covering the whole (European) range of Germanic languages. From a theoretical perspective, most papers concentrate on constraint-based approaches. Crucial to those theories are principles of the phonology-morphology interaction, both within and between languages. The well documented Germanic languages provide an excellent field for research and almost all papers deal with aspects of the interface.

For the first time in over thirty years a revolution is happening in phonology, with the advent of constraint-based approaches which directly oppose the rule-and-derivation tradition of mainstream Generative Phonology. The success of Optimality Theory and the rapidity of its spread since its official launch in 1993 is remarkable even by the general standards of most post-1950s linguistics. Many phonologists appear to have been caught up in the whirlwind, as witnessed in the substance of many current working papers and conferences the world over, and the recent contents of well-established journals. Two questions naturally arise: What is Optimality Theory about? In what way is Optimality Theory superior to traditional theory, if indeed it is? In this book, leading specialists and active researchers address these issues directly, and focus deliberately on the evaluation of the two competing approaches rather than on simple displays of their applicability to limited bodies of data.

Current theoretical approaches to language devote great attention to macro- and micro-variation and show an ever-increasing interest in minority languages. In this respect, few empirical domains are as rich and lively as the Italo-Romance languages, which together with Albanian were the main research domain of Leonardo M. Savoia. The volume covers areas as different as phonology, morphology, syntax and the lexicon. A broad range of Romance languages is considered, as well as Albanian, Greek and Hungarian, shedding new light on many classical topics. The first section focuses on morphosyntax, both in the narrow sense and with regard to its interfaces. The second section focuses on clitics and pronouns. The third section deals with a number of issues in phonology and syntax-phonology interface. The last section turns the reader’s attention beyond formal linguistics itself and examines variation in the light of neurosciences, pathology, historical linguistics and political discourse.