Books by Andrew (University of Essex) Spencer

In most languages we find 'little words' which resemble a full word, but which cannot stand on their own. Instead they have to 'lean on' a neighbouring word, like the 'd, 've and unstressed 'em of Kim'd've helped'em ('Kim would have helped them'). These are clitics, and they are found in most of the world's languages. In English the clitic forms appear in the same place in the sentence that the full form of the word would appear in but in many languages clitics obey quite separate rules of placement. This book is the first introduction to clitics, providing a complete summary of their properties, their uses, the reasons why they are of interest to linguists and the various theoretical approaches that have been proposed for them. The book describes a whole host of clitic systems and presents data from over 100 languages.

This is an introduction to the burgeoning field of morphology in generative grammar. Presupposing very little prior knowledge in linguistics, the text guides the reader from absolute basics to contemporary theoretical developments.

Useful for the undergraduate student, this book provides a presentation of the fundamental concepts of phonology. This book contains the four main themes - syllable structure, feature structure, rules and stress/rhythm that include references to a variety of languages.