This book considers the evolution of the grammatical structure of words in the contexts of human evolution and the origins of language. The author challenges the conventional views of the relationship between syntax and morphology, the adaptationist view of language evolution, and the notion that language in some way reflects 'laws of form'.

Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. He has a BA (Hons) in Literae Humaniores from Oxford and a PhD on inflectional morphology from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. In 1969 he was awarded a Harkness Fellowship and from 1969 to 1972 he was in the linguistics PhD program at MIT. His books include Allomorphy in Inflexion (Croom Helm, 1987), Current Morphology (Routledge 1992), The Origins of Complex Language (OUP, 1999), and An Introduction to English Morphology (EUP 2002).

• 1: Design in Language and Design in Biology


• 2: Why There is Morphology: Traditional Accounts


• 3: A Cognitive-Articulatory Dilemma


• 4: Modes of Synonymy Avoidance


• 5: The Ancestors of Affixes


• 6: The Ancestors of Stem Alternants


• 7: Derivation, Compounding, and Lexical Storage


• 8: Morphological homonymy and Morphological Meanings


• 9: Conclusions