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.
Extra-grammatical morphology is a hitherto neglected area of research, highly marginalised because of its irregularity and unpredictability. Yet many neologisms in English are formed by means of ...extra-grammatical mechanisms, such as abbreviation, blending and reduplication, which therefore deserve both greater attention and more systematic study. This book analyses such phenomena. Elisa Mattiello, University of Pisa, Italy.
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