Complex Words
Advances in Morphology

Drawing on innovative research, the book reveals the wealth and breadth of the study of word-formation, both theoretically and empirically.

Lívia Körtvélyessy (Edited by), Pavol Štekauer (Edited by)

9781108748377, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 6 April 2023

397 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.574 kg

'By uniting the world's top morphologists in a single volume, this book offers an exclusive insight into how current theories tackle some of the most challenging – and exciting – aspects of complex words. A comprehensive and accessible account of the latest advances in morphology that is set to become a modern classic.' Réka Benczes, Corvinus University of Budapest

A state-of-the-art survey of complex words, this volume brings together a team of leading international morphologists to demonstrate the wealth and breadth of the study of word-formation. Encompassing methodological, empirical and theoretical approaches, each chapter presents the results of cutting-edge research into linguistic complexity, including lexico-semantic aspects of complex words, the structure of complex words, and corpus-based case studies. Drawing on examples from a wide range of languages, it covers both general aspects of word-formation, and aspects specific to particular languages, such as English, French, Greek, Basque, Spanish, German and Slovak. Theoretical considerations are supported by a number of in-depth case studies focusing on the role of affixes, as well as word-formation processes such as compounding, affixation and conversion. Attention is also devoted to typological issues in word-formation. The book will be an invaluable resource for academic researchers and graduate students interested in morphology, linguistic typology and corpus linguistics.

Introduction: advances in morphology: a summary Jan Don and Martin Everaert
Part I. Lexico-Semantic Aspects of Complex Words: 1. Formal semantics and the problem of nominalizations Rochelle Lieber
2. Semantically subtractive morphology Stephen Anderson
3. -less and –free Mark Aronoff
4. Instrument Nouns in -one in Latin and Romance Franz Rainer
5. Prominence in noun-to-verb conversion Heike Baeskow
6. On Spanish dvandva and its restrictions Antonio Fábregas
Part II. Structure of Complex Words: 7. Estonian case inflection made simple. A case study in word and paradigm morphology with linear discriminative learning Yu-Ying Chuang, Kaidi Lõo, James P. Blevins, and R. Harald Baayen
8. Uninflectedness: uninflecting, uninflectable, and uninflected words, or the complexity of the simplex Andrew Spencer
9. Complex exponents Gregory Stump
10. Derivational patterns in proto-basque word structure Juliette Blevins
11. The complexity of greek verbal morphology: the case of prefixed verbs Artemis Alexiadou
12. Affixoids, an intriguing intermediate category Angela Ralli
Part III. Corpus-Based Case Studies: 13. Competition between synthetic nn compounds and nn.GEN phrasal nouns in polish: semantic niches, hapax legomena and low-level construction schemas Bozena Cetnarowska
14. An s is an s', or is it? Plural and genitive-plural are not homophonous Ingo Plag, Sonia Ben Hedia, Arne Lohmann, and Julia Zimmermann
15. The role of word-formation families and subfamilies in the organisation of German diminutive compounds Wolfgang U. Dressler, Sonja Schwaiger, and Jutta Ransmayr
16. Semantic patterns in noun-to-verb conversion in English Salvador Valera
17. Onomatopoeia: on the crossroads of sound symbolism and word-formation Lívia Körtvélyessy, and Pavol Štekauer
18. Dingsbums and thingy: placeholders for names in German and other languages Petra M. Vogel.

Subject Areas: Research methods: general [GPS], Semantics, discourse analysis, etc [CFG], Historical & comparative linguistics [CFF], Linguistics [CF]