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.
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.
The case study concentrates on a lexical adaptation of the nouns
and
in the Slovak language. The processes of borrowing and subsequent adaptation are analysed in accordance with the theory of lexical ...motivation (TLM). Lexical adaptation represents a process on the basis of which a loanword is incorporated into the system of the borrowing language (L2), i.e. serving as an underlying, motivating word for coining new lexemes, and thus generates a
(
). The concept of the nomination family is based on the understanding of the term word-formation nest, commonly used in derivatology. The nomination family is a cluster of all lexemes (single-word, or multi-word expressions), which are grouped around the initial, underlying, motivating loanword on the basis of formal and semantical relationships. The nomination family of the loanwords
and
is substantial, and includes more than 200 entries. Both initial lexemes (
,
) are taken from English (using the terminology of TLM, the concept of interlingual motivation is employed) while the nomination relationship – abbreviation (
→
) has been transferred from L1 to L2. The word
is thus polymotivated, its formation can be viewed in a twofold way: (a) as a loanword it has been borrowed from L1 (interlingual motivation), (b) as an abbreviation it has been formed from
(abbreviation motivation). A number of entries have been taken over and integrated at the same time (e.g.
,
,
,
etc.) into the
nomination family in the Slovak language. The impact of word-formation is extraordinarily evident in the formation from the word
, cf. words denoting male and female persons (
,
), adjectives (
,
), verbs (
), and notably compounds and their derivatives (
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
, etc.). Even though almost half of derivatives can be classified as nonce-formations, this kind of word-formation manifests a huge potentiality of word-formation motivation in the Slovak language. Moreover, a significant place in the
nomination family is held by multiword expressions such as
‚political blog‘,
‚travel blog‘. In addition, competition between multi-word expressions and semantically identical compounds (
) is rare. A complex notion to be denominated is predominantly expressed either by means of a multi-word expression (
‚financial blog‘,
‚book blog‘), or a compound (
,
).
This volume brings together contributions whose aim is to discuss the nature of paradigms in derivational morphology and compounding in the light of evidence from various languages.