Irregularity is a philological concept which is not adequately defined. The present volume aims to improve the understanding of irregularity within the domain of morphology, relating to inflectional, derivation, and compounding. Studies aim to discover the potential regularity behind irregularities, the fact or hypothesis that regular (sound) change produces irregularity (Sturtevant's Paradox), the nature of paradigms (esp. suppletion and overabundance), and the interplay of irregular morphology with syntax and pragmatics. Perspectives are synchronic and diachronic. A few studies approach irregularity from the psycholinguistic point of view (issues of memory and acquisition). Languages studied include Latin and its daughter languages French, Catalan and Italian, but also English, German, Greek, Russian, Turkish, Thompson Salish, and the Iroquoian languages. Theories discussed include Canonical Typology, Distributed Morphology, Whole Word Morphology, Minimalism, and the Procedural/Declarative Model.

Irregularity is a philological concept which is not adequately defined. The present volume aims to improve the understanding of irregularity within the domain of morphology, relating to inflectional, derivation, and compounding. Studies aim to discover the potential regularity behind irregularities, the fact or hypothesis that regular (sound) change produces irregularity (Sturtevant's Paradox), the nature of paradigms (esp. suppletion and overabundance), and the interplay of irregular morphology with syntax and pragmatics. Perspectives are synchronic and diachronic. A few studies approach irregularity from the psycholinguistic point of view (issues of memory and acquisition). Languages studied include Latin and its daughter languages French, Catalan and Italian, but also English, German, Greek, Russian, Turkish, Thompson Salish, and the Iroquoian languages. Theories discussed include Canonical Typology, Distributed Morphology, Whole Word Morphology, Minimalism, and the Procedural/Declarative Model.

While linguistic theory is in continual flux as progress is made in our ability to understand the structure and function of language, one constant has always been the central role of the word. On looking into words is a wide-ranging volume spanning current research into word-based morphology, morphosyntax, the phonology-morphology interface, and related areas of theoretical and empirical linguistics. The 26 papers that constitute this volume extend morphological and grammatical theory to signed as well as spoken language, to diachronic as well as synchronic evidence, and to birdsong as well as human language.

The authors provide a compelling argument for a radically modular view of the human language faculty. The authors 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.

The volume contains 18 contributions from senior and junior scholars covering core issues within the theoretical investigation of the architecture and the mechanisms of the faculty of language, with particular emphasis on the computational component. They all pursue a comparative approach, investigating and comparing different languages and dialects or comparing different modes of acquisition, as in Adriana Belletti’s work, to whom the volume is dedicated. The papers in the first part (by Chomsky, Rizzi, Bianchi & Chesi, Cinque, Costa, Calabrese) deal with theoretical issues such as labeling, the cartography of structures and the locality of derivations in a broad sense. The papers in the second part (by Haegeman & Lohndal, Delfitto & Fiorin, Cruschina, Lahousse, Di Domenico and Contemori, Dal Pozzo & Matteini) concentrate on the realization of structure relative to discourse, particularly on topic and focus positions in the vP periphery, and on referential dependencies. The third part collects papers (by Cardinaletti & Volpato, Friedmann, Yachini & Szterman, Snyder & Hyams, Hamann & Tuller, Cecchetto & Donati, Grewendorf & Poletto) that specifically target intervention effects in relative clauses as apparent in different structures, different languages, and different populations.

In recent years, an increasing number of linguists have re-examined the question of whether markedness has explanatory power, or whether it is a phenomenon that begs explanation itself. This volume brings together a collection of articles with a broad range of critical viewpoints on the notion of markedness in phonological theory. The contributions span a variety of phonological frameworks and relate to morphosyntax, historical linguistics, neurolinguistics, biolinguistics, and language typology. This volume will be of particular interest to phonologists of both synchronic and diachronic persuasions and has strong implications for the architecture of grammar with respect to phonology and its interfaces with morphosyntax and phonetics.

This special tribute to Elizabeth Ann Bates--a psycholinguist, developmental psychologist, and cognitive scientist--spans her brilliant career of wide-ranging interdisciplinary interests. It should appeal to international scholars in the fields of develo