Laura Downing's Canonical forms in prosodic morphology is overall an excellent, clearly written and informative work that should be of great interest to any linguist interested in the phonology–morphology interface. This book succeeds in meeting two goals. First, it meets the descriptive goal of presenting and analysing data from a wide array of languages. Second, it meets the theoretical goal of developing a formal theory of canonical forms (= prosodic shapes). From a theoretical standpoint, the arguments developed in Downing's book support and develop Generalised Template Theory (GTT; see McCarthy & Prince Reference McCarthy and Prince1994, Urbanczyk Reference Urbanczyk1996) within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky Reference Prince and Smolensky1993). Importantly, Downing departs from earlier work in GTT by emphasising the role of the interaction between morphological complexity and phonological complexity. This distances her proposals from GTT, in that her approach does not rely as heavily on the prosodic hierarchy, which many have previously viewed as the central structural device vital to the phonology–morphology interface.
Another benefit of Downing's approach, both from a formal and a descriptive perspective, is the extension of her model to systems beyond the classic and well-known systems of reduplication. Downing's model is applied in the book to minimality effects, non-concatenative systems and hypocoristic and truncation processes, resulting in a wide range of data coverage. In this model, independence from the prosodic hierarchy is an essential element. Instead of the prosodic hierarchy being structurally responsible for templatic behaviours, Morpheme-Based Templates (MBTs) assume the role of determining canonical form. Essentially, Downing's proposal is that lexical morphemes ‘meet minimality requirements … because they are heads and license complex phonological structure’. Downing relies on Dresher & van der Hulst's (Reference Dresher and van der Hulst1998) head–dependent asymmetry theory, which provides an explanation for the relationship between prominent positions on the one hand and complex structure on the other. When these structures interface with elements of the morphological hierarchy (root, stem, affix), the phenomena associated with templatic behaviour are explained.
Downing proposes certain phonological constraints in order to account for these behaviours. She adapts a constraint from Russell (Reference Russell, Archangeli and Langendoen1997), which demands that a single morpheme should correspond in the phonology to a single syllable (Morpheme-Syllable). This constraint could be viewed as a member of the markedness family of constraints (if evaluated by examining an output form and determining whether the surface form of an individual morpheme is coextensive with a single syllable). Interestingly, Downing considers such a constraint to belong to the faithfulness family of constraints, rather than the markedness family; in any case, its effect is to force each prosodic word to contain at least one root (morphology) which in turn must contain a single syllable (phonology). Analogues of this constraint can be found in the OT literature from McCarthy & Prince (Reference McCarthy and Prince1993) onwards, but such alternatives would be rejected by Downing due to their reliance on the prosodic hierarchy. In addition to Morpheme-Syllable, Downing also invokes the markedness constraint HeadsBranch, a restriction on the prosodic structure of morphemes. This constraint requires lexical heads, or roots, to branch at the prosodic level (branching is defined by Downing following work by Ussishkin Reference Ussishkin2000). Taken together, these ingredients form the bulk of Downing's model. Aside from applying her model to various familiar patterns, she also applies it to many new cases from a diverse set of languages over the five chapters of the book. A summary of these chapters follows.
Chapter 1, ‘Introduction’, provides a very clearly written introduction, and lays out the scope and domain of the remainder of the book. Downing takes care to explicitly define prosodic morphology and quite helpfully provides excellent background, so that the reader who might be unfamiliar with the topic is able to easily follow her points. I found this to be particularly well written, and makes the book quite accessible to linguists from a variety of backgrounds. From page 3 onwards, Downing supplies extensive data to illustrate these points, and throughout the chapter (and the rest of the book) all data presented are well explained. Later in the chapter, she discusses McCarthy & Prince's (Reference McCarthy and Prince1986) approach to prosodic morphology and templatic behaviours, and introduces the prosodic hierarchy. A useful discussion of maximality conditions and binarity follows; this is crucial, since much work in prosodic morphology revolves around these concepts. Downing then turns to OT-based approaches to prosodic morphology, using Ilokano reduplication as a test case. An interesting and complicated aspect of the Ilokano data is that the language employs two types of reduplication (‘light’ and ‘heavy’), and each type requires a different constraint ranking. On the one hand, this introduces a degree of complexity into the introductory chapter that some might find confusing; on the other hand, it also provides a frankly complex example as a starting case, and thus raises the level of engagement with the reader. Another positive aspect about this chapter is that it complements the setting forth of new ideas with discussion of theoretical approaches that some younger linguists may not be familiar with. For instance, Downing frames her discussion of morphological factors in terms of the classic Item-and-Arrangement vs. Item-and-Process distinction (e.g. Hockett Reference Hockett1954). This perspective helps to connect Downing's proposals to earlier work in a very beneficial way; such connections are rarely explicitly made by linguists working within OT.
Chapter 2, ‘Prosodic hierarchy-based templates’, reviews the phenomena that GTT, restricted to the prosodic hierarchy for the purpose of defining templates, has been applied to. In this chapter, Downing also points out what she considers to be serious shortcomings of this approach. Essentially, her objections concern the correlation between prosodic hierarchy-induced effects and morphological templates. Most clearly presented is the discussion regarding stress and reduplication; Downing notes that many languages that have templatic restrictions on their reduplicants or other morphologically derived components do not have corresponding metrical structure. She illustrates this point with data from non-concatenative systems well known for their templatic behaviour (Arabic, Hebrew, Sierra Miwok), and shows that in such cases the bisyllabic template imposed on verb stems does not follow from the stress system or vice versa; this point was also made by Spring (Reference Spring1990) with respect to Axininca Campa. Given the central nature of such data to the prosodic hierarchy-based template (PBT) approach, Downing criticises such models as inadequate, justifying the alternative approach using morpheme-based templates.
In Chapter 3, ‘Morpheme-based templates’, Downing develops her alternative in order to more clearly capture the nature of templatic behaviours. Morpheme-Syllable is reintroduced, and the discussion moves on to investigate differential morpheme size and shape as a manifestation of positional markedness. Essentially, Dresher & van der Hulst's head–dependent asymmetry ensures that heads require branching structure, while non-heads do not. Branching is realised through binarity, following Ussishkin (Reference Ussishkin2000), though Downing argues that Morpheme-Syllable is a more explanatory mechanism for the observation that heads prefer branching structure. Interestingly, the discussion raises questions regarding what counts as a head. Earlier work (e.g. Revithiadou Reference Revithiadou1999) provides compelling evidence from the prosodic behaviour of phonological accent that affixes can be heads, if they are category-changing; this morphocentric view seems to run counter to Downing's view that the morphology is in control. Another problem with Downing's approach using MBT is illustrated with the analysis of Modern Hebrew verbal derivations and the persistent stem bisyllabicity observed in such cases. Downing proposes to replace Ussishkin's (Reference Ussishkin2000, Reference Ussishkin2005) analysis with the constraint RealiseMorpheme, but, as Ussishkin has demonstrated, such a constraint fails for languages like Modern Hebrew, since it only requires minimal morpheme realisation. In Modern Hebrew, every phonological segment of an affix, not just the number of segments required to phonologically distinguish one morpheme from another, must surface. Based on this problem, it's not clear how successful Downing's approach is with respect to melodic overwriting cases of the type seen in Hebrew.
In Chapter 4, ‘The role of phonology in defining canonical form in MBT’, Downing explores cases in which roots in various languages deviate from the canonical form predicted by MBT. She discusses the influence of prosodic factors on word-minimality, and how they can override the demands of morphological constraints; these factors include prosodic correspondence, phonotactics and prosodic prominence enhancement. From Downing's point of view, these factors are the ones that have previously led morphophonologists to choose PBT-based explanations. Once again, in this chapter Downing amasses a truly impressive array of data from a wide variety of languages.
Chapter 5, ‘Questions for future research and conclusion’, closes the book by offering a candid discussion of potential problems for the MBT approach. For instance, single consonant reduplication (also known as bare consonant reduplication) runs foul of the prosodic minimality requirement, and on the other end of the scale, some languages have morphophonological processes resulting in supramaximal shapes. Downing does an excellent job of providing potential and thoughtful solutions to such problems, with a clear and honest approach that is more data-driven than theoretically dogmatic. This is a very refreshing way to end the book, and also provides a nice roadmap for research to be done in the future.
In sum, Downing's book is an impressive collection of data with a well thought out, well argued theoretical agenda. She does a outstanding job of explaining previous approaches, describing their problems, and using a typologically vast set of data to support her claims. It clearly and engagingly attains its goals, is accessible to scholars from a wide range of backgrounds and disciplines within the field, and contributes enormously to our understanding of the phonology–morphology interface.
