One of the things that drew me to linguistics several decades ago was a sense of wonder at both the superficial diversity and the underlying commonality of languages. My wonder arose in the process of working through my first few problem sets in linguistics, not surprisingly, problem sets that involved morphological analysis. What I learned first was not theory – indeed at that moment in linguistic history morphology was not perceived as a separate theoretical area in the US – but what languages were like, how to analyze data, and what to call things. I love morphological theory, but for drawing beginning students into the field of linguistics, I believe that there is no substitute for hands-on learning, and that is where this book starts.

This book is intended for undergraduate students who may have had no more than an introductory course in linguistics. It assumes that students know the International Phonetic Alphabet, and have a general idea of what linguistic rules are, but it presupposes little else in the way of sophistication or technical knowledge. It obviously assumes that students are English-speakers, and therefore the first few chapters concentrate on English, and to some extent on languages that are likely to be familiar to linguistics students from language study in high school and university. As the book progresses, I introduce data from many languages that will be “exotic” to students, so that by the end of the book, they will have some sense of linguistic diversity, at least with respect to types of morphology.