Contents -- Preface and acknowledgements -- 1 Design in language and design in biology -- 1.1 A difficulty faced by human linguists -- 1.2 How to overcome the difficulty: The power of abductive reasoning -- 1.3 Narrowing the focus: Why does morphology exist? -- 1.4 Design in biology: What it does and does not mean -- 1.4.1 'Design' does not mean 'intelligent design' -- 1.4.2 'Good design' is not tautologous -- 1.4.3 Examples of bad design in vertebrates -- 1.5 Back to language: Williams and Chomsky -- 1.6 Advice to readers -- 2 Why there is morphology: Traditional accounts -- 2.1 A puzzle as viewed from Mars -- 2.2 The two systems within grammar: Are they genuinely distinct? -- 2.3 Morphology as syntax below the word level -- 2.3.1 Lieber and the sing-sang question -- 2.3.2 Lieber and the pig-hunter question -- 2.4 Morphology as a driver for syntactic displacement -- 2.5 Morphology as the grammar of bound items -- 2.6 Morphology as lexical structure -- 2.7 Morphology as the detritus of linguistic change -- 2.7.1 Linguistic change and the pig-hunter question -- 2.7.2 Linguistic change and the sing-sang question -- 2.8 The puzzle remains -- 3 A cognitive-articulatory dilemma -- 3.1 Setting the scene: Speech with vocabulary but no grammar -- 3.2 Synonymy avoidance: A broader-than-human trait -- 3.2.1 The elusiveness of exact synonymy in human language -- 3.2.2 Synonymy avoidance among animals -- 3.3 A dilemma: The development of 'synonyms' due to assimilation -- 3.3.1 The speed of speech production in protolanguage -- 3.3.2 Assimilatory effects of fluent speech -- 3.3.3 Cliché patterns and the loss of phonological conditioning -- 3.4 Isolated synonymies versus systematic synonymy patterns -- 3.4.1 Two obvious ways of resolving synonymy dilemmas -- 3.4.2 Systematic synonymy patterns and how they might evolve -- 3.5 The way ahead.

4 Modes of synonymy avoidance -- 4.1 Syntagmatic synonymy avoidance -- 4.2 Paradigmatic synonymy avoidance -- 4.2.1 Individual multilingualism -- 4.2.2 Community multilingualism: The Vaupés case -- 4.2.3 Multivocabulism: Two Australian cases -- 4.2.4 'High', 'middle', 'low', honorific, and belittling vocabularies in Javanese -- 4.2.5 A common characteristic: Vocabular clarity -- 5 The ancestors of affixes -- 5.1 Preliminaries: 'Distinct items' and 'distinct forms of the same item' -- 5.2 Multivocabulism among unselective items: The origin of inflection classes -- 5.2.1 Case study 1: Hungarian verbs and the role of phonological context -- 5.2.2 Case study 2: Latin nouns and the role of gender -- 5.2.3 Case study 3: German noun inflection and the role of 'elsewhere' -- 5.2.4 Case study 4: Italian verbs and the irrelevance of stem alternation -- 6 The ancestors of stem alternants -- 6.1 Differentiation by semantic or syntactic function -- 6.2 Differentiation by syntagmatic phonological factors, and a note on suppletion -- 6.3 Differentiation by paradigmatic predictability -- 6.3.1 Case study 5: Italian verbs: Stem alternants with uniform distribution -- 6.3.2 Case study 6: Dhaasanac: Another instance of uniform distribution -- 6.3.3 Case study 7: Nesting in Russian nominal stress patterns -- 6.3.4 Case study 8: German verbs and implicational paradigm structure conditions -- 6.3.5 Case study 9: Stem and affix interactions in Polish -- 6.4 Summing up: The importance of non-affixal morphology -- 7 Derivation, compounding, and lexical storage -- 7.1 Two gaps in coverage -- 7.2 Clichés outside cliché patterns -- 7.3 Individually memorized collocations -- 7.4 The link between derivation and individual memorization -- 7.5 A puzzle partly solved: Phrases inside compound words -- 8 Morphological homonymy and morphological meanings -- 8.1 Homonymy.

8.2 The decomposition of morphological meanings -- 8.3 Drawbacks of binary features in describing inflection classes -- 9 Conclusions -- 9.1 Evaluating the abductive argument -- 9.2 A novel prediction: Inflection classes as 'vocabularies' -- 9.2.1 Possible counterevidence from Sanskrit -- 9.2.2 Possible counterevidence from Icelandic nouns -- 9.3 Summing up: Morphology, the spine, and the peacock's tail -- References -- Language Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- P -- R -- S -- T -- Z -- Name Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Z -- Subject Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Z.