This volume contains selected papers concerning syntax and morphology originally presented at the 14th meeting of the International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL) held in Bergamo on 21–25 August 2006. The area covered by this volume — morphology and syntax — is traditionally a central one for many scholars working in the field of diachronic linguistics. Its continued importance is shown by the continued production of numerous important monographs and studies, as the bibliographical references in the papers of this volume attest. Studies in the
field of syntax and morphology have also become wider and richer with the contribution of many recent methodological innovations – from grammaticalisation studies to textual perspectives, from pragmatics to a sociolinguistic approach – which have influenced both synchronic and diachronic studies.

This book is the first complete theory of the morphology of language. It describes both inflection and lexical word formation, their relation to syntax, phonology, and semantics, and to each other. It enumerates most of the morphological categories of the world's languages, describing their recombinant abilities, and how they are realized in inflectional and lexical derivations.

Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy discusses current issues in morphology within linguistic theory, giving fair coverage to all approaches which have been influential over the last twenty years. He concentrates not only on the generative linguistic mainstream, discussing the lexicalist morphology initiated by Chomsky and the syntactically oriented approaches that have developed in the `80s, but also on approaches that are less fashionable or relatively unknown to English-speaking linguists.

A recurrent issue in linguistic theory and psychology concerns the cognitive status of memorized lists and their internal structure. In morphological theory, the collections of inflected forms of a given noun, verb, or adjective into inflectional paradigms are thought to constitute one such type of list. This book focuses on the question of which elements in a paradigm can stand in a relation of partial or total phonological identity. Leading scholars consider inflectional identity from a variety of theoretical perspectives, with an emphasis on both case studies and predictive theories of where syncretism and other "paradigmatic pressures" will occur in natural language. The authors consider phenomena such as allomorphy and syncretism while exploring questions of underlying representations, the formal properties of markedness, and the featural representation of conjugation and declension classes.

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Overt subjects are usually considered as a property of finite clauses. However, most Romance languages permit specified subjects in a broad range of infinitive constructions. Guido Mensching analyzes this phenomenon in stages of French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and other Romance varieties.