Exploring the meanings of morphemes and how they combine to form the meanings of complex words, this book examines derived words (writer, unionize), compounds (dog bed, truck driver), and words formed by conversion. Using a series of case studies from English, Rochelle Lieber analyzes the lexical semantics of word formation in a systematic way. The reader is able to explore the nature of affixal polysemy--the reasons why there are multiple affixes with the same function, and the issues of mismatch between form and meaning in word formation.

This is the most comprehensive book to date on word formation in terms of scope of topics, schools and theoretical positions. All contributions were written by the leading scholars in their respective areas.

This is the most comprehensive book to date on word formation in terms of scope of topics, schools and theoretical positions. All contributions were written by the leading scholars in their respective areas.

Exploring the meanings of morphemes and how they combine to form the meanings of complex words, this book examines derived words (writer, unionize), compounds (dog bed, truck driver), and words formed by conversion. Using a series of case studies from English, Rochelle Lieber analyzes the lexical semantics of word formation in a systematic way. The reader is able to explore the nature of affixal polysemy--the reasons why there are multiple affixes with the same function, and the issues of mismatch between form and meaning in word formation.

This book presents a comprehensive review of theoretical work on the linguistics and psycholinguistics of compound words and combines it with a series of surveys of compounding in a variety of languages from a wide range of language families. Compounding is an effective way to create and express new meanings. Compound words are segmentable into their constituents so that new items can often be understood on first presentation. However, as keystone, keynote, and keyboard, and breadboard, sandwich-board, and mortarboard show, the relation between components is often far from straightforward....

This book presents a comprehensive, data-rich, theory-neutral description of English word formation, including inflection and derivation, compounding, conversion, and such minor processes as subtractive morphology. It also offers analyses of the theoretical challenges these phenomena present. It is the first to make systematic use of large linguistic corpora, including the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the British National Corpus, and the American National Corpus by which, for example, the authors are able to measure the productivity of different patterns and to trace semantic...

This volume presents a data-rich description of English inflection and word-formation. Based on large corpora including the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British national Corpus, it is the first comprehensive treatment of contemporary English morphology that includes both inflection and word-formation. It covers not only well-studied topics such as compounding, conversion, and the inflection and derivation of nouns and verbs, but also areas that have received less scholarly attention, such as the formation of adjectives, locatives, negatives, evaluatives, neoclassical...

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...

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...