A workshop on Prosodic Morphology took place on 22–24 June 1994 at the Research Institute for Language and Speech at Utrecht University. The workshop was funded by the Dutch L.O.T.-program (Landelijke Onderzoekschool Taalwetenschap, Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics), and the organizers were the three editors of this volume: René Kager and Wim Zonneveld of Utrecht University and Harry van der Hulst of Leiden University.

In the first half of the 1990s, the idea of a workshop focusing on Prosodic Morphology was among those perhaps least in need of a motivation: there appears to be a consensus in both the literature and the field of phonology and its relation to morphology that this is typically one of the areas of linguistics which combines two highly recommendable characteristics – theoretical advancement is rapid, and often novel empirical data, especially from less well-known languages, are brought to bear on theoretical proposals and ideas. Rather than with the comparatively uneventful morpheme concatenations of the languages traditionally familiar to us, Prosodic Morphology deals with the exciting world of binyanim, reduplications and even double reduplications, infixes, templates and minimal words. This was reflected in the workshop's attendance figures: funding was based on an expected attendance of some forty people; well over a hundred actually turned up, to listen, to be informed about the latest research results, and to join in the often very lively question and discussion periods. A total of sixteen talks were presented and this volume contains ten of them. The introduction presents a brief background sketch of the research area of Prosodic Morphology.