Using extensive data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, 2008), this groundbreaking book shows that the syntactic patterns in which English nominalizations can be found and the range of possible readings they can express are very different from what has been claimed in past theoretical treatments, and therefore that previous treatments cannot be correct. Lieber argues that the relationship between form and meaning in the nominalization processes of English is virtually never one-to-one, but rather forms a complex web that can be likened to a derivational ecosystem. Using...

This book explains how children's early ability to distinguish between animate and inanimate nouns helps them acquire complex sentence structure.

This controversial new book addresses the linguistic problems around compounds: words which sit on the borderline of syntax and morphology.