The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology - Laurie Bauer

The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology

By: Laurie Bauer, Rochelle Lieber, Ingo Plag

Hardcover | 1 August 2013

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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 developments as they happen.

After setting out their methodology and theoretical assumptions, the authors describe word formation and inflection in contemporary English. They give equal weight to form and meaning and cover nominalizations, agentive forms, comparatives, root and synthetic compounds, as well as more recondite topics such as the abstract noun-forming suffixes -hood, -dom, and -ship, neoclassical compounds, and the morphology of numbers. They examine the relations between orthography and phonological form. While their focus is on contemporary morphology, they trace the history of phenomena wherever doing so helps to understand and explain current form and function. The final part of the book shows how the data assembled within it bear on current theoretical issues and reveal new lines of research. This outstanding book will interest all scholars and students of English and of linguistic morphology more generally.
Industry Reviews
This impressive volume will, for years to come, be an indispensable tool for researchers on English morphology. * Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, Morphology *
The depth and the amount of research that has gone into this work are impressive. The care and thoroughness with which the authors present the corpus-based data are exemplary, and their decision to downplay theory while including copious helpful references to a wide number of synchronic approaches is commendable. This work will be of value to scholars of all sorts who study English, providing analytical bases for later work, data for classroom problems, and rich material for browsing. It is also a fine example of international collaboration between leading morphologists from three continents. * The Linguistic Society of America *
It will be unputdownable for considerable time to anyone interested in 'words', how they yield to and defy morphological analysis, and how their incredible range of properties can be classified and commented upon by dyed-in-the-wool morphologists, employing 'modern' ways of data collecting. * Wim Zonneveld, Journal of Linguistics *
This comprehensive book, which covers all aspects of English morphology, is a needed reference work. * P.J. Kurtz, CHOICE *

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