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.
The Meaning of Nominalisation Ten Hacken, Pius
Roczniki humanistyczne,
07/2023, Letnik:
71, Številka:
11sp
Journal Article
Odprti dostop
Nominalisation is a morphological process producing a noun on the basis of an input that may belong to various categories. As noun is a syntactic category, whether something is a noun can only be ...decided on the basis of syntactic evidence, not on the basis of its meaning or morphological behaviour.
As a theoretical framework, I use Jackendoff’s Parallel Architecture (PA) as a basis, but I argue for a separate word formation component. The central difference between word formation rules and regular lexical entries is that the latter contribute to the production of the representation of interpreted performance, whereas the former produce new lexical entries, thus changing competence. As a consequence, an expression in interpreted performance needs the identification of a reference in the communicative context, whereas word formation needs the identification of a concept in a speaker’s knowledge, which involves onomasiological coercion.
A distinction can be made between two types of nominalisation, which I illustrate with Dutch examples. In one type, the meaning is changed, e.g. jager ‘hunter’ from jagen ‘huntv’, in the other it is not, e.g. telling ‘countn’ from tellen ‘countv’. Nominalisations of the latter type are transpositions. This distinction can be made both for deverbal and for deadjectival nouns.
Rules changing representations in PA can be classified in seven classes according to which of the structures they modify. Only those that change conceptual structure qualify for being part of the word formation component. This excludes transpositions. Many nouns can be interpreted as either a transposition or a result of word formation. An example is vertaling ‘translation’, which can refer to the process or the result of translation. I argue that there is a word formation rule that produces the second reading on the basis of the first, and show that this rule belongs to a type that is predicted by the typology of rules for modifying representations in PA.
Drawing on detailed case studies across a range of languages, including English, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Czech, Russian, Lithuanian and Greek, this book examines the different ...factors that determine the outcome of the interaction between borrowing and word formation.
The Suffix -ation in English ten Hacken, Pius; Panocová, Renáta
Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik,
06/2022, Letnik:
47, Številka:
1
Journal Article
This paper analyses the role of the suffix -ation in English, based on data from the OED. The suffix forms deverbal nouns. Its origin can be traced back to Latin, but French had an important part in ...it, too. For the analysis, nouns in -ation and their corresponding verbs were retrieved from the OED. The purpose of the analysis was to characterize the position of -ation in the mental lexicon of current speakers of English and to assess the role of the word formation rule in the history of the formation of nouns in -ation. For the analysis, Marchand’s classification of nouns in -ation is used, which distinguishes nouns with verbs ending in -ify, -ize, -ate, and other verbs. This classification is combined with the information about first attestation dates provided by the OED. Cases where more than one verb can underlie a particular noun are studied in detail. Particular attention is paid to the issue of backformation, i.e. cases where the noun has been attested earlier than the verb. In the interpretation of these cases, the perspective of individual speakers is highlighted.
A relational adjective (RA) is an adjective that does not express a property, but rather a relation to a concept designated by a noun. It is a controversial issue whether RA+N combinations are ...compounds or syntactic phrases. If we adopt a definition of compound that takes the semantics as an important component, RA+N combinations should be analysed as compounds. If RA+N and N+N are both compounding, we might expect that languages that have both choose names for the corresponding concepts independently of each other, so that an RA+N in one language is randomly connected to the name for the same concept selected in another language. I tested this hypothesis by analysing German and Italian translations of Levi's (1978) list of 383 compounds illustrating her Recoverably Deletable Predicates (RDPs) and nominalization types. The analysis shows that there is a strong cross-linguistic correlation in the use of RA+N. This raises the question of how to explain the correlation. I argue that it cannot be explained by a translation bias or a semantic bias, but that it provides evidence for how the choice of a name in the naming process is influenced by a speaker's mental lexicon and how speech communities relate to such choices by individual speakers. Keywords: relational adjective, compounding, translation, naming
Confusion between look-alike and sound-alike (LASA) medication names (such as mercaptamine and mercaptopurine) accounts for up to one in four medication errors, threatening patient safety. Error ...reduction strategies include computerized physician order entry interventions, and 'Tall Man' lettering. The purpose of this study is to explore the medication name designation process, to elucidate properties that may prime the risk of confusion.
We analysed the formal and semantic properties of 7,987 International Non-proprietary Names (INNs), in relation to naming guidelines of the World Health Organization (WHO) INN programme, and have identified potential for errors. We explored: their linguistic properties, the underlying taxonomy of stems to indicate pharmacological interrelationships, and similarities between INNs. We used Microsoft Excel for analysis, including calculation of Levenshtein edit distance (LED). Compliance with WHO naming guidelines was inconsistent. Since the 1970s there has been a trend towards compliance in formal properties, such as word length, but longer names published in the 1950s and 1960s are still in use. The stems used to show pharmacological interrelationships are not spelled consistently and the guidelines do not impose an unequivocal order on them, making the meanings of INNs difficult to understand. Pairs of INNs sharing a stem (appropriately or not) often have high levels of similarity (<5 LED), and thus have greater potential for confusion.
We have revealed a tension between WHO guidelines stipulating use of stems to denote meaning, and the aim of reducing similarities in nomenclature. To mitigate this tension and reduce the risk of confusion, the stem system should be made clear and well ordered, so as to avoid compounding the risk of confusion at the clinical level. The interplay between the different WHO INN naming principles should be further examined, to better understand their implications for the problem of LASA errors.
Drawing on detailed case studies across a range of languages, including English, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Czech, Russian, Lithuanian and Greek, this book examines the different ...factors that determine the outcome of the interaction between borrowing and word formation.
As a side effect of the rapid progress in medical research and of the emergence of new medical conditions, medicine is a domain where new concepts have to be named more frequently than in many other ...domains. Because of the prominent position of English in medical research, most of these concepts are first named in English. This raises questions relating to the naming strategies adopted and the consequences of the choice of particular strategies. These consequences are not restricted to English, because the English terms often need to be translated and are sometimes borrowed. This volume consists of an introduction and eight chapters. The first four chapters focus on the choice of naming strategy and the consequences for the transparency of the resulting names in English. These chapters address the international pharmaceutical nomenclature, the terminology of psychiatry and of middle-ear surgery, and the use of neoclassical word formation. The following four chapters concentrate on the issues of translation and borrowing evolving from the choice of names in English. They address translation into Spanish, Slovak, Polish and Turkish.
Abstract
The central question of this paper is how the inclusion of new words in dictionaries can be related to the empirical reality and norms of language. Because dictionaries are generally ...dictionaries of a language, the starting point is how this notion of named language is framed. The traditional view of a language as a system is contrasted with the corpus-based view of a language as realized in use and with the Chomskyan view based on language as a speaker’s competence. Then, the nature of words in each perspective is discussed, leading to different characterizations and different standards for the evaluation of new words. The function of new words is generally to name new concepts. In naming, word formation, sense extension, and borrowing can be used. Whereas lexicographers see their task as mainly descriptive, users often expect dictionaries to be gatekeepers. The competence-based perspective can serve as a ground where these views can be reconciled.
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