'Christopher Hall's book is the best new introduction to linguistics that I have seen in decades. It is engagingly written without talking down to the reader and it covers all the subparts of the field in a comprehensive and even-handed manner. I plan to use it the next time that I teach an introductory course at Washington.' Professor Frederick J. Newmeyer, University of Washington

'With apt examples from novels and newspapers, courtroom trials and telephone conversations, the lowly and the mighty, his book repeatedly startles as it casts light on language. This is a bright,...

The central concern of this book is the explanation of linguistic form. It examines in detail certain cross-linguistic patterns in morphological systems, providing unified explanations of the observation that suffixes predominate over prefixes and the correlation between affix position and syntactic head position. The explanation of the suffixing preference is one which appeals to principles of language processing, tempered by cognitive constraints underlying language change. These factors, coupled with generative morphological analysis, also provide an explanation for the head/affix...