Word Formation

This textbook provides an accessible introduction to the study of word-formation, that is, the ways in which new words are built on the bases of other words (e.g. happy - happy-ness), focusing on English. The book's didactic aim is to enable students with little or no prior linguistic knowledge to do their own practical analyses of complex words. Readers are familiarized with the necessary methodological tools to obtain and analyze relevant data and are shown how to relate their findings to theoretical problems and debates. The book is not written in the perspective of a particular theoretical framework and draws on insights from various research traditions, reflecting important methodological and theoretical developments in the field. It is a textbook directed towards university students of English at all levels. It can also serve as a source book for teachers and advanced students, and as an up-to-date reference concerning many word-formation processes in English.

This is the most comprehensive book to date on word formation in terms of scope of topics, schools and theoretical positions. All contributions were written by the leading scholars in their respective areas.

Although the illustrative material is drawn principally from English, general points are illustrated with a variety of languages to provide a new perspective on a confused and often controversial field of study.

This handbook comprises an in-depth presentation of the state of the art in word-formation. The five volumes contain 207 articles written by leading international scholars. The XVI chapters of the handbook provide the reader, in both general articles and individual studies, with a wide variety of perspectives: word-formation as a linguistic discipline (history of science, theoretical concepts), units and processes in word-formation, rules and restrictions, semantics and pragmatics, foreign word-formation, language planning and purism, historical word-formation, word-formation in language acquisition and aphasia, word-formation and language use, tools in word-formation research. The final chapter comprises 74 portraits of word-formation in the individual languages of Europe and offers an innovative perspective. These portraits afford the first overview of this kind and will prove useful for future typological research. This handbook will provide an essential reference for both advanced students and researchers in word-formation and related fields within linguistics.

This book aims to contribute to a growing interest amongst psycholinguists and morphologists in the mechanisms of meaning predictability. It presents a brand-new model of the meaning-prediction of novel, context-free naming units, relating the wordformation and wordinterpretation processes. Unlike previous studies, mostly focussed on N+N compounds, the scope of this book is much wider. It not only covers all types of complex words, but also discusses a whole range of predictability-boosting and -reducing conditions. Two measures are introduced, the Predictability Rate and the Objectified Predictability Rate, in order to compare the strength of predictable readings both within a word and relative to the most predictable readings of other coinages. Four extensive experiments indicate inter alia the equal predicting capacity of native and non-native speakers, the close interconnection between linguistic and extra-linguistic factors, the important role of prototypical semes, and the usual dominance of a single central reading.

This handbook comprises an in-depth presentation of the state of the art in word-formation. The five volumes contain 207 articles written by leading international scholars. The 16 sections of the handbook provide the reader in general articles and individual studies with a wide variety of perspectives. The final section contains 74 portraits of word-formation in the individual languages of Europe and offers an innovative perspective.

This book deals with the interplay between word-formation and metonymy. It shows that, like metaphor, metonymy interacts in important ways with morphological structure, but also warns us against a virtually unconstrained conception of metonymy. The central claim here is that word-formation and metonymy are distinct linguistic components that complement and mutually constrain each other. Using linguistic data from a variety of languages, the book provides ample empirical support for its thesis. It is much more than a systematic study of two neglected linguistic phenomena, for a long time thought to be unimportant by linguists. Through exposing and explaining the intricate interaction between metonymy and word formation from a cognitive linguistic perspective, the reader is presented with a sense of the amazing complexity of the development of linguistic systems. This book will be essential reading for scholars and advanced students interested in the role of figuration in grammar.

This book explores a relatively little investigated area of creole languages, word-formation. It provides the most comprehensive account so far of the word-formation patterns of an English-based creole language, Sranan, as found in its earliest sources, and compares them with the patterns attested in the input languages. One of the few studies of creole morphology based on historical data, the book discusses the theoretical problems arising with the historical analysis of creole word-formation and provides an analysis along the lines of Booij's (2005, 2007) Construction Morphology in which the assumed boundaries between affixation, compounding and syntactic constructions play a very minor role. It shows that Early Sranan word-formation is characterised by the absence of superstrate derivational affixes, the use of free morphemes as derivational markers and of compounding as the major word-formation strategy. The emergence of Early Sranan word-formation involved multiple sources (the input languages, universals, language-internal development) and different mechanisms (reanalysis of free morphemes as derivational markers, adaptation of superstrate complex words, transfer from the substrates and the creation of innovations). The findings render untenable theoretical accounts of creole genesis based on one explanatory factor, such as superstrate or substrate influence.