基本説明
Postulated word-formation rules often exclude formations that can nevertheless be found in actual usage. This book presents an in-depth investigation of a highly heterogeneous word-formation pattern in English: the formation of nouns by suffixation with -ee.
Full Description
Postulated word-formation rules often exclude formations that can nevertheless be found in actual usage. This book presents an in-depth investigation of a highly heterogeneous word-formation pattern in English: the formation of nouns by suffixation with -ee. Rather than relying on a single semantic or syntactic framework for analysis, the study combines diachronic, cognitive and language-contact perspectives in order to explain the diversity in the formation and establishment of -ee words. It also seeks to challenge previous measurements of productivity and proposes a new way to investigate the relationship between actual and possible words. By making use of the largest and most up-to-date electronic corpus - the World Wide Web - as a data source, this research adds substantially to the number of attested -ee words. It furthermore analyses this word-formation pattern in different varieties of English (British vs. American English; Australian English). Due to the multiplicity of approaches and analyses it offers, the study is suitable for courses in English word-formation, lexicology, corpus linguistics and historical linguistics.
Contents
1. Acknowledgments; 2. List of tables and figures; 3. List of abbreviations; 4. Chapter 1. Introduction: Polysemy, heterogeneity and ambiguity in word-formation patterns; 5. Chapter 2. Phonological, syntactic and semantic constraints on the formation of -ee words; 6. Chapter 3. The career of -ee words: A diachronic analysis from medieval legal use to nineteenth-century ironic nonce words; 7. Chapter 4. Morphology and the lexicon: On creativity and productivity of -ee words; 8. Chapter 5. A corpus-based analysis of 1,000 potential new -ee words; 9. Chapter 6. -ee words in varieties of English; 10. Conclusion. On the study of an individual word-formation pattern: General and particular implications; 11. Works cited; 12. Appendix 1. Documentation of established -ee words with their citation sources: A comparison (in alphabetical order); 13. Appendix 2. Quantitative analysis of 1,000 potential -ee words (Web-search, February-June 2005); 14. Name index; 15. Subject index
