The Semantics Of Word Formation And Lexicalization

In the study of word formation, the focus has often been on generating the form. In this book, the semantic aspect of the formation of new words is central. It is viewed from the perspectives of word formation rules and of lexicalization. An extensive introduction gives a historical overview of the study of the semantics of word formation and lexicalization, explaining how the different theoretical frameworks used in the contributions relate to each other. Each chapter then concentrates on a specific question about a theoretical concept or a word formation process in a particular language and adopts a theoretical framework that is appropriate to the study of this question. From general theoretical concepts of productivity and lexicalization, the focus moves to terminology, compounding, and derivation. Theoretical frameworks discussed include Jackendoff's Conceptual Structure, Langacker's Cognitive Grammar, Lieber's lexical semantic approach to word formation, Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon, Beard's Lexeme-Morpheme-Base Morphology, The onomasiological approach to terminology and word formation.

This volume offers a valuable overview of recent research into the semantic aspects of complex words through different theoretical frameworks. Contributions by experts in the field, both morphologists and psycholinguists, identify crucial areas of research, present alternative and complementary approaches to their examination from the current level of knowledge, and indicate perspectives of research into the semantics of complex words by raising important questions that need to be investigated in order to get a more comprehensive picture of the field. Recent decades have seen both extensive and intensive development of various theories of word-formation, however, the semantic aspects of complex words have, with a few notable exceptions, been rather neglected. This volume fills that gap by offering articles written by leading experts in the field from various theoretical backgrounds.

Outline of English Lexicology: Lexical Structure, Word Semantics and Word Formation.

Pavol Štekauer presents an original approach to the intricate problems of English word-formation. The emphasis is on the process of coining new naming units (words). This is described by an onomasiological model, which takes as its point of departure the naming needs of a speech community, and proceeds through conceptual reflection of extra-linguistic reality and semantic analysis to the form of a new naming unit. As a result, it is the form which implements options given by semantics by means of the so-called Form-to-Meaning Assignment Principle. Word-formation is conceived of as an independent component, interrelated with the lexical component by supplying it with new naming units, and by making use of the word-formation bases of naming units stored in the Lexicon. The relation to the Syntactic component is only mediated through the Lexical component. In addition, the book presents a new approach to productivity. It is maintained that word-formation processes are as productive as syntactic processes. This radically new approach provides simple answers to a number of traditional problems of word-formation.

Morphology and Lexical Semantics explores the meanings of morphemes and how they combine to form the meanings of complex words, including derived words (writer, unionise), compounds (dog bed, truck driver) and words formed by conversion. Rochelle Lieber discusses the lexical semantics of word formation in a systematic way, allowing the reader to explore the nature of affixal polysemy, the reasons why there are multiple affixes with the same function and the issues of mismatch between form and meaning in word formation. Using a series of case studies from English, this book develops and justifies the theoretical apparatus necessary for raising and answering many questions about the semantics of word formation. Distinguishing between a lexical semantic skeleton that is featural and hierarchically organised and a lexical semantic body that is holistic, it shows how the semantics of word formation has a paradigmatic character.

Lexicalization, a process of language change, has been conceptualized in a variety of ways. Broadly defined as the adoption of concepts into the lexicon, it has been viewed by syntacticians as the reverse process of grammaticalization, by morphologists as a routine process of word-formation, and by semanticists as the development of concrete meanings. In this up-to-date survey, Laurel Brinton and Elizabeth Traugott examine the various conceptualizations of lexicalization that have been presented in the literature. In light of contemporary work on grammaticalization, they then propose a new, unified model of lexicalization and grammaticalization. Their approach is illustrated with a variety of case studies from the history of English, including present participles, multi-word verbs, adverbs, and discourse markers, as well as some examples from other Indo-European languages. The first review of the various approaches to lexicalization, this book will be invaluable to students and scholars of historical linguistics and language change.

Presents three frameworks for studying morphology, offering different insights into the meaning of compounds.