Book Notices

Abstract

The 4th International Morphology Meeting was organized by the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and held in Veszprém from April 29 – May 1, 1990. The actual year of appearance of this volume is 1994. The main topic of the conference was the morphology-syntax interface. This double issue of the Acta Linguistica Hungarica contains the following papers: Thomas Becker, in “Do words have heads?”, criticizes the use of the notion ‘head’ in morphology, and advocates a paradigmatic approach to word formation. Manfred Bierwisch gives an explicit semantic account of deverbal nominalizations in his paper “Event nominalizations: proposals and problems”. Rudolf Botha argues in “Minding one’ s metatheory in doing morphology” that the choice between a syntactic or a morphological account of certain phenomena may not be an empirical matter, but rather dependent on the choice of one’s metatheory. Cristina Burani’s paper, “The lexical representation of prefixed words: data from production tasks” deals with the issue how morphologically complex words are stored in the mental lexicon. Does the morphological structure of a complex word a role in production and perception? The answer is in the affirmative. Wolfgang Dressler and Ursula Doleschal deal with the role of gender in grammar and discourse, in their paper “Gender agreement via derivational morphology”. Bernhard Kettemann’s contribution, “At the phonology/morphology interface”, deals with the proper analysis of morphonological alternations. His view is that alternations might be represented both in the lexicon, and accounted for by rule. Ferenc Kiefer’s paper discusses “Noun incorporation” in Hungarian. Noun incorporation creates lexical units that still have some syntactic properties, similar to separable complex verbs in Dutch and German. A second psycholinguistic article is that by Alessandro Laudanna, about “The role of inflectional morphology in lexical processing”. Laudanna’ s conclusion is that psycholinguistic processes are sensitive to the distinction between derivation and inflection. The final paper, Wiecher Zwanenburg’s “French deverbal nouns and argument structure” gives an account of the syntactic properties of French deverbal nouns in terms of manipulation of theta-roles.