"This book presents two converging approaches to the analysis of morphologically complex words. The first, developed by Alan Ford and Rajendra Singh and identified in this book as the Montreal approach, comes from the direction of phonology, focusing on the twin questions of the boundary between phonology and word structure, and the status of morphophonemics in grammatical theory. The second, developed by Stanley Starosta at the University of Hawai’i, was the unplanned offspring of an attempt to constrain the power of Chomskyan syntactic theory, an attempt which produced a monostratal syntactic dependency theory called ‘lexicase’.

"This volume exposes the inadequacies of morpheme or stem based theories of morphology and introduces the two versions (the Montreal version, called Whole Word Morphology by Ford and Singh and the ‘lexicase’ one) of a radically a morphous morphology, somewhat mischievously designated, by Starosta, as ‘seamless morphology’. It also makes clear their many shared assumptions and principles as well as the differences between them.

"A number of contributors deal with ‘compounding’ and ‘incorporation’, two of the toughest problems in maintaining the seamless position. Other contributions show the advantages of that position in analysing synchronic and diachronic problems connected with lexical derivation in Arabic, Bangla, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Spanish and Micronesian languages.

"With its fresh exploration of an important issue in the study of language, this volume will attract the attention of theoretical linguists, descriptive grammarians, historical linguists, lexicologists, and others involved in issues of word formation."