The Evolution of Morphology

This book considers the evolution of the grammatical structure of words in the more general contexts of human evolution and the origins of language. The consensus in many fields is that language is well designed for its purpose, and became so either throu

Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. He has a BA (Hons) in Literae Humaniores from Oxford and a PhD on inflectional morphology from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. In 1969 he was awarded a Harkness Fellowship and from 1969 to 1972 he was in the linguistics PhD program at MIT. His books include Allomorphy in Inflexion (Croom Helm, 1987), Current Morphology (Routledge 1992), The Origins of Complex Language (OUP, 1999), and An Introduction to English Morphology (EUP 2002).