Full Description
We are all familiar with coming across a new word, whether it has just been invented or whether we have just not met it before. How do we invent new words? How do we understand words that we have never heard before? What are the limits on the kinds of words we produce? How have linguists and grammarians dealt with the phenomenon of creating new words, and how justified are their ways of viewing such words? In this concise and compelling book, Professor Bauer, one of the world's best-known morphologists, looks back over fifty years of his work, seeking out overlooked patterns in word-formation, and offering new solutions to recurrent problems. Each section deals with a different morphological problem, meaning that the book can either be read from start to finish, or alternatively used as a concise reference work on the key issues and problems in the field.
Contents
Conventions and abbreviations; Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction; Part I. Basic Questions: 2. Reflections on the background to the study of word-formation; 3. Reflections on why we need word-formation; 4. Reflections on the recognition of novelty in words; 5. Reflections on blocking and competition; 6. Reflections on potential and norm; 7. Reflections on definition by stipulation and on word-class; 8. Reflections on analogical word-formation; 9. Reflections on the nature of the lexeme; Part II. Semantic Questions: 10. Reflections on how words mean and what this implies for complex words; 11. Reflections on tautology and redundancy; Part III. Syntactic Questions: 12. Reflections on recursion; 13. Reflections on problems with heads in word-formation; 14. Reflections on coordination in word-formation; Part IV. Interfaces: 15. Reflections on the interface between morphology and phonology: morphophonemics; 16. Reflections on the interface between word-formation and syntax; 17. Reflections on the interface between word-formation and phonetics; 18. Reflections on the interface between word-formation and orthography; 19. Reflections on the interface between word-formation and borrowing patterns of word-formation in English; Part V. Patterns of Word-Formation in English: 20. Reflections on the limits of conversion; 21. Reflections on back-formation; 22. Reflections on coordinative compounds; 23. Reflections on the irregularity of prepositions; 24. Reflections on reduplication; Part VI. Historical Questions: 25. Reflections on dead morphology; 26. Reflections on compounds in English and in wider Germanic; Part VII. Questions Involving Inflection: 27. Reflections on inflection inside word-formation; 28. Reflections on canonical form; 29. Reflections on the spread of regular inflection to simple and derived forms; 30. Conclusion; Indexes.
