A core tenet of lexicalism is that the properties of words are determined in morphology by different principles than those which determine syntax, yet both morphology and syntax feed into semantics. Kazuhiko Fukushima develops an approach dubbed 'Montagovian Morphology' – a lexicalist and compositional approach to word-formation inspired by Montague grammar. Using rich semantic representations to represent word meanings, he analyzes complex word forms in Japanese involving adverbial modification, negation, and inflectional and derivational morphology, and argues that the lexicalist approach provides a superior account to decompositional syntactic analyses, on the basis of both empirical coverage and theoretical motivation.

Peter Sells, University of York

This book is a major semantic study of some complex morphological constructions in Japanese. The author proposes direct compositional semantic analyses for a number of Japanese constructions in which the desired semantic compositional structure does not appear to match the surface morpho-syntactic structure. Specifically, the book deals with 'size morphemes' such as ko-, the past tense -ta, the negation -nai, etc. An important alternative to analyses based on LF structures derived through syntactic movements.

Toshiyuki Ogihara, University of Washington