A pioneering book establishing the foundations for research into word-formation typology and tendencies. It fills a gap in cross-linguistic research by being the first systematic survey of the ...word-formation of the world's languages. Drawing on over 1500 examples from fifty-five languages, it provides a wider global representation than any other volume. This data, from twenty-eight language families and forty-five language genera, reveals associations between word-formation processes in genetically and geographically distinct languages. Data presentation from two complementary perspectives, semasiological and onomasiological, shows both the basic functions of individual word-formation processes and the ways of expressing selected cognitive categories. Language data was gathered by way of detailed questionnaires completed by over eighty leading experts on the languages discussed. The book is aimed at academic researchers and graduate students in language typology, linguistic fieldwork and morphology.
A detailed study of compound words in English, which analyses all aspects of their behaviour in the language
This book makes two major contributions to our understanding of the formal grammar of ...English. One is the topic of compounding in English, and in particular the long-standing but unresolved research question of the difference between English compounds and phrases. The other is the theory of Lexicalism, the only version of Generative Grammar to have taken a serious interest in words and their structure. Bringing the two topics together, Heinz Giegerich shows that it is impossible to draw a dividing line between compounds and phrases, and therefore between the lexicon and the syntax, the two grammatical modules of Lexicalism; and he proposes a new model of grammatical modularity whereby the lexicon and the syntax overlap 'like slates on a roof'. This book will be of interest to all researchers and students with an interest in English linguistics or in morphological, syntactic or phonological theory.
Each chapter 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. The theoretical frameworks that are used 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, and the onomasiological approach to terminology and word formation. 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.
Martin Hilpert combines construction grammar and advanced corpus-based methodology into a new way of studying language change. Constructions are generalizations over remembered exemplars of language ...use. These exemplars are stored with all their formal and functional properties, yielding constructional generalizations that contain many parameters of variation. Over time, as patterns of language use are changing, the generalizations are changing with them. This book illustrates the workings of constructional change with three corpus-based studies that reveal patterns of change at several levels of linguistic structure, ranging from allomorphy to word formation and to syntax. Taken together, the results strongly motivate the use of construction grammar in research on diachronic language change. This new perspective has wide-ranging consequences for the way historical linguists think about language change. It will be of particular interest to linguists working on morpho-syntax, sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics.
The first systematic study of the early phases in the acquisition of derivational morphology from a cross-linguistic and typological perspective. It presents ten empirical longitudinal studies in ...genealogically and typologically diverse languages (Indo-European, Finno-Ugric, Altaic) with different degrees of derivational complexity.
The book is devoted to word-formation in written and spoken German. Corpus analyses trace diamedial usage patterns and functions of word formations in single texts, text complexes, text types as well ...as in linguistic interaction. From a theoretical point of view, the study draws on textual and interactional linguistic approaches as well as cognitive semantic and constructional grammatical approaches.
This paper studies the morphological productivity of adjective-forming prefixes at the level of word-formation rules. The productivity at the aforementioned level is the union of the productivity at ...the level of word-formation types and morphological types. The aim of the paper is to offer pieces of information on the interaction of different concepts within different word-formation types together with the morphological aspect through different morphological types. We find 267 examples of adjectives and analyse 31 prefixes interacting with various simple or complex adjectives in the corpus comprised of news, literary, academic and TV registers. After analytic, descriptive and statistical methods, we conclude that they fall into 5 different conceptual categories, i.e., wordformation type clusters (Quality, Location, Quantity, Time and State). The majority of clusters show that the stem is determining the conceptual category while prefixes refine it. The highest productivity rates are recorded with such word-formation types. The only exceptions are Quantity and Time where the conceptual category depends on the prefixes and stems equally. The results from the morphological analyses show that most of the prefixes are inserting additional semantic pieces of information, usually recording the highest PR and not changing the conceptual category of the stem and appearing within one or multiple clusters, with exceptions for Quantity and Time.
The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical ...linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.
