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Elizabeth O. Selkirk, The syntax of words. (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs 7.) Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1982. Pp. xii + 136.

Selkirk's book Phonology and syntax: the relation between sound and structure has been forthcoming for some years, and is described in The syntax of words (ix) as 'still forthcoming'. The present work is a version of what was originally intended as the first chapter of Phonology and syntax. Its first draft goes back to 1977, we are told, and earlier versions have been cited by various workers on word-structure in the northeastern US; for example, it appears cryptically in the bibliography of Lieber (1981) as 'Selkirk, E. 1978. Untitled. Unpublished Ms., University of Massachusetts at Amherst'. Several of its merits and limitations are of just the kind one would expect, given its provenance. On the positive side, Selkirk achieves a high standard in clarity and rigour. On the negative side, she neglects almost all previous work on morphology, by non-generativists except for Adams (1973) and Marchand (1969) (which was brought to the attention of generative linguists by Aronoff(i976)), and even by generativists outside what one might call the New England Group; for example, there is no mention of Wurzel (1970) or Kiefer (1970), while in her short but sensible treatment of inflexion she neglects the fairly thorough discussion by Warburton (1973), and even the recent work of Anderson at UCLA is dismissed curtly and, to my mind, rather unfairly in a footnote (130). But Selkirk would probably defend these omissions on the ground that what matters is the results that her narrowing of focus enables her to achieve. So what are the results?