Book excerpt: "Prosodic morphology concerns the interaction of morphological and phonological determinants of linguistic form and the degree to which one determines the other. This is the first book devoted to understanding the definition and operation of canonical forms - the invariant syllabic shapes of morphemes - which are the defining characteristic of prosodic morphology. Dr Downing discusses past research in the field and provides a critical evaluation of the current leading theory which, she shows, is empirically inadequate."--BOOK JACKET.