Lexical strata in English: Morphological causes, phonological effects. By Heinz J. Giegerich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. ix, 329. Hardcover. $69.95.

Extract

In this creative and ambitious book, Giegerich undertakes perhaps the most comprehensive study ever of phonology-morphology interaction in English in the framework of lexical phonology and proposes major modifications of certain aspects of the theory. The book is full of interesting and thought-provoking claims, supported by thorough empirical demonstrations. At the same time, however, it is curiously out of touch with recent developments in the field. For example, Optimality Theory, which has become the de facto lingua franca of phonologists, is not even mentioned. Perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that many developments in the 1990s in the framework of lexical phonology are also ignored. For example, although Giegerich devotes a whole chapter to Strict Cycle effects, he fails to acknowledge Kiparsky's (1993) approach to such effects (now properly called Non-Derived Environment Blocking, though Giegerich continues to use the outdated term) based on Radical Underspecification and structure-filling default rules.