The book is a generative study of a number of English and Polish processes of suffixation. It
focuses on various constraints on such processes. The allomorphy of English inflection is shown
to follow from language-specific constraints on syllable structure. English derivational
suffixes are shown to be crucially sensitive to the morphological make up of their bases - the
majority fails to attach to a suffixed stem while the rest attaches to a well-defined subset
of all suffixed stems. Thus some major tenets of the current mainstream generative theory of
the lexicon (Affix Ordering Generalization and Bracket Erasure Convention) are called into
question. A detailed discussion of verbalizing processes of contemporary Polish reveals that
rules of suffixation are subject to constraints on their bases the proper formulation of which
specially involves the distinction root stem. Markedly distinct characteristics of root-based
and stem-based morphological rules are thoroughly discussed. The productive deverbal
morpholocial processes in Polish are shown to require access to more than one component
formative in the base which seriously undermines some constraints advanced in the literature
(Adjacency condition Atom condition).
