The name Network Morphology denotes a way of conceptualizing a language’s morphological system as the assemblage of facts gathered at nodes that are themselves linked together with other nodes all inhabiting the same network, as we will see in the following chapters. Network Morphology is also suggestive of the highly collaborative nature of this framework’s origins and ongoing development. How this network of linguists and computational linguists took shape is the story behind the story of this book. On a day in February 1988 at the University of Sussex, Gerald Gazdar demonstrated to Grev Corbett the workings of DATR, a lexical knowledge representation language invented by Roger Evans and Gerald, which was later adopted as the formalism that underpins Network Morphology theories. Immediately Grev recognized DATR’s expressiveness for describing distinctly morphological issues. The collaborative network had just begun to form, but what proved to be a crucial addition had to wait a further three years, when Grev met Norman Fraser, both a linguist and computational linguist with near native fluency in DATR. A series of DATR sessions yielded the first proto-Network Morphology paper which was read at the First International DATR conference in August 1991, and was on Russian nominal inflection. The theme of the paper was syncretism, one of several major areas of word structure which Network Morphology has been so extensively engaged in. Through this early work on Russian inflectional morphology, two other themes were to emerge: parsimonious representation of inflectional classes and gender assignment. An early paper on these topics is Corbett and Fraser (1993). Russian morphology seemed a good place to start to play with some of these ideas, and in September 1992 Dunstan Brown and Andrew Hippisley joined Grev and Norman as research fellows on two major grants, sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Leverhulme Trust to develop a DATR-representation of fragments of Russian’s inflectional and derivational systems. Alan Timberlake became involved to advise on morphophonological aspects; he also collaborated on one of the first morphophonological Network Morphology papers, Brown, Corbett, Fraser, Hippisley and Timberlake (1996). Soon after Dunstan and Andrew’s arrival the name Network Morphology was given to the default inheritance and DATR-represented approach to word structure. The development of Network Morphology was supported by a further major grant from the ESRC in 1995, and the emergent framework started to yield analyses of other languages besides Russian such as Arapesh (Fraser and Corbett 1997), Polish (Brown 1998a) and Bininj Gun-wok (Evans, Brown and Corbett 1998). It also brought in Nick Evans, Marianne Mithun and Greg Stump, consultants on the project and wonderful support ever since.

It is to the members of this network that we wish to express our gratitude, without whom the Network Morphology book would not have been possible. We would also like to thank the following for their careful reading of draft chapters, and whose insightful comments we have attempted to assimilate: Matthew Baerman, Patricia Cabredo Hofherr, Grev Corbett, Roger Evans and Greg Stump. Thanks are also due to Andrew Spencer for discussion of clitics and edge features, among many other things. We owe an intellectual debt to the champions of the lexeme-based approach to morphology, which Network Morphology unswervingly takes: Mark Aronoff, Stephen Anderson, Peter Matthews, Gregory Stump and Arnold Zwicky. We would like to thank the Cambridge Studies in Linguistics series editorial board both for their excellent comments and for their encouragement for the project; these have unquestionably improved the final product. For material support we would like to thank the ESRC (R000233633) and the Leverhulme Trust (F.242M) for bringing us to Grev and Norman, and for bringing us together, the ESRC (R000236063) for supporting the development of the theory, the British Council and German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for supporting work on Russian verbal morphology, the British Council and Research Council of Norway who supported work on case exceptions in Russian, and the ESRC (R000237939) for supporting work on syncretism, which brought Matthew Baerman into the Network Morphology enterprise. The ESRC also supported projects on paradigms in use (RES-000–23–0082), deponency (RES-000–23–0375) and periphrasis (RES-062–23–0696) from which elements of the book have benefited. The Arts and Humanities Research Council is to be thanked for supporting projects on defectiveness (AH/D001579/1) and on languages of the Bougainville region (B/RG/AN4375/APN19365) on which Bill Palmer was the researcher. We thank Bill for answering our questions on Kokota during the writing of this monograph. The European Research Council is to be thanked for providing funding for the project on morphological complexity (ERC-2008-AdG-230268 MORPHOLOGY) during which part of the research for the book was carried out. We are grateful to the University of Kentucky’s College of Arts & Sciences for a summer fellowship to employ our excellent proof reader, Amanda Barie, and to support Andrew Hippisley’s visit to Surrey in May 2010. Thanks go to Penny Everson and Claire Turner for further editorial assistance. For their help with seeing the book through to publication we would like to thank Andrew Winnard and colleagues at Cambridge University Press, Sarah Green, Tom O’Reilly, and Kay McKechnie for copy-editing. We would also like to express our gratitude to Marina Chumakina for discussion of Archi-related issues. She and Alexander Krasovitsky also helped us with judgments on Russian-related matters, and Magda Fiałkowska is to be thanked for her intuitions on some of the Polish examples.

Brown is responsible for the writing of Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 8 and Hippisley for the writing of Chapters 1, 5, 6 and 7, but the ideas presented throughout the book and the theoretical underpinnings they share result from our joint thinking on these topics. Some chapters are developments from earlier published work. Much of Chapter 2 is new, but it draws on work from Brown (1998a, b), Brown’s contribution to Evans, Brown and Corbett (2002) and Brown (2007). Chapter 3 draws in part on work carried out in Brown (1998b), but the presentation is new and the theoretical basis substantively revised in the light of recent developments. Sections of Chapter 4 are based on parts of Brown’s contribution to Baerman, Brown and Corbett (2005), particularly the discussion of Dalabon and Dhaasanac. Parts of Chapter 5 were first published as Hippisley (2007), parts of Chapter 6 as Hippisley (2010a, b), and the ideas presented in Chapter 7 originate in Hippisley (1997, 1998, 2001). A full bibliography of Network Morphology style analyses can be found at www2.surrey.ac.uk/ english/research/smg/webresources/network_morphology_bibliography.htm

Full Network Morphology theories of the various morphological analyses presented in the following chapters can be downloaded and tested using the book’s accompanying website www.cambridge.org/Brown-Hippisley

Our final and deepest acknowledgement is to our wives, Rachel Hippisley and Shirley Kennedy. Thank you for your tireless, unending support.