How vividly I recall the feeling of eager anticipation looking forward to the well-organized and informative lectures Professor Carleton Hodge presented in his 'Structure of Ancient Egyptian' course at the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Linguistic Institute of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor during the summer of 1965. I was a graduate student in linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley at the time, taking his and three other courses. Little did I imagine then that he and I would maintain a lively correspondence from that summer on for the next thirty-three years, nor did I expect that we would come to spend so much time together at the joint annual meetings of the American Oriental Society and the North American Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics, which we would regularly attend for a quarter of a century. We also lectured on each other's campuses, and I took great delight that many of my fellow Californians personally came to appreciate not only his scholarship (Hodge 1991a and 1991c), but also his charming and celebrated wit and sense of humor.

Focusing on one textbook, F. Katamba's Morphology, this review article examines basic desiderata and pitfalls of textbook-writing for the neophyte in morphology and in linguistics in general. A number of fundamental issues are addressed: coverage, tenninology, readability, consistency, referencing, and accuracy. A few hazards in writing introductory textbooks are highlighted, such as the presentation of a number of alternative theories before a single theoretical approach has been finnly established, as well as the inclination to be comprehensive at the expense of cohesion and coherence, a practice which often leads to a proliferation of tenninology and detracts from major insights.

Competence-based theories of island effects play a central role in generative grammar, yet the graded nature of many syntactic islands has never been properly accounted for. Categorical syntactic accounts of island effects have persisted in spite of a wealth of data suggesting that island effects are not categorical in nature and that nonstructural manipulations that leave island structures intact can radically alter judgments of island violations. We argue here, building on work by Paul Deane, Robert Kluender, and others, that processing factors have the potential to account for this otherwise unexplained variation in acceptability judgments.

We report the results of self-paced reading experiments and controlled acceptability studies that explore the relationship between processing costs and judgments of acceptability. In each of the three self-paced reading studies, the data indicate that the processing cost of different types of island violations can be significantly reduced to a degree comparable to that of nonisland filler-gap constructions by manipulating a single nonstructural factor. Moreover, this reduction in processing cost is accompanied by significant improvements in acceptability. This evidence favors the hypothesis that island-violating constructions involve numerous processing pressures that aggregate to drive processing difficulty above a threshold, resulting in unacceptability. We examine the implications of these findings for the grammar of filler-gap dependencies.