Formacion De Palabras En Ingles

Word-formation in English
by

Ingo Plag Universität Siegen

in press

Cambridge University Press Series ‘Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics’

Draft version of September 27, 2002

i

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction .......................................................................................................... 1

1. Basic concepts 1.1. What is a word? 1.2. Studyingword-formation 1.3. Inflection and derivation 1.4. Summary Further reading Exercises

4 4 12 18 23 23 24

2. Studying complex words 2.1. Identifying morphemes 2.1.1. The morpheme as the minimal linguistic sign 2.1.2. Problems with the morpheme: the mapping of form and meaning 2.2. Allomorphy 2.3. Establishing word-formation rules 2.4. Multiple affixation 2.5. Summary Further reading Exercises

2525 25

27 33 38 50 53 54 55

3. Productivity and the mental lexicon 3.1. Introduction: What is productivity? 3.2. Possible and actual words 3.3. Complex words in the lexicon 3.4. Measuring productivity

551 551 561 59 64

1

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ii 3.5. Constrainingproductivity 3.5.1. Pragmatic restrictions 3.5.2. Structural restrictions 3.5.3. Blocking 3.6. Summary Further reading Exercises 73 74 75 79 84 85 85

4. Affixation 4.1. What is an affix? 4.2. How to investigate affixes: More on methodology 4.3. General properties of English affixation 4.4. Suffixes 4.4.1. Nominal suffixes 4.4.2. Verbal suffixes 4.4.3. Adjectival suffixes 4.4.4. Adverbial suffixes4.5. Prefixes 4.6. Infixation 4.7. Summary Further reading Exercises

90 90 93 98 109 109 116 118 123 123 127 130 131 131

5. Derivation without affixation 5.1. Conversion 5.1.1. The directionality of conversion 5.1.2. Conversion or zero-affixation? 5.1.3. Conversion: Syntactic or morphological? 5.2. Prosodic morphology 5.2.1. Truncations: Truncated names, -y diminutives and clippings 5.2.2.Blends

134 134 135 140 143 145

146 150

iii 5.3. Abbreviations and acronyms 5.4. Summary Further reading Exercises 160 165 165 166

6. Compounding 6.1. Recognizing compounds 6.1.1. What are compounds made of? 6.1.2. More on the structure of compounds: the notion of head 6.1.3. Stress in compounds 6.1.4. Summary 6.2. An inventory of compounding patterns 6.3. Nominal compounds 6.3.1Headedness 6.3.2. Interpreting nominal compounds 6.4. Adjectival compounds 6.5. Verbal compounds 6.6. Neo-classical compounds 6.7. Compounding: syntax or morphology? 6.8. Summary Further reading Exercises

169 169 169

173 175 181 181 185 185 189 194 197 198 203 207 208 209

7. Theoretical issues: modeling word-formation 7.1. Introduction: Why theory? 7.2. The phonology-morphology interaction:lexical phonology 7.2.1. An outline of the theory of lexical phonology 7.2.2. Basic insights of lexical phonology 7.2.3. Problems with lexical phonology 7.2.4. Alternative theories 7.3. The nature of word-formation rules

211 211 212 212 217 219 222 229

iv 7.3.1. The problem: word-based versus morpheme-based morphology 7.3.2. Morpheme-based morphology 7.3.3. Word-based morphology 7.3.4.Synthesis Further reading Exercises 230 231 236 243 244

References

246

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ABBREVIATIONS AND NOTATIONAL CONVENTIONS

A AP Adv C I LCS n1 N N NP OT P P* PP PrWd SPE UBH UOH V V VP V WFR

adjective adjectival phrase adverb consonant pragmatic potentiality lexical conceptual structure hapax legomenon noun number of observations noun phrase Optimality Theory productivity in the narrow senseglobal productivity prepositional phrase prosodic word Chomsky and Halle 1968, see references unitary base hypothesis unitary output hypothesis verb vowel verb phrase extent of use word formation rule

# . |

word boundary syllable boundary in the context of

vi < / [ * ! > / ] orthographic representation phonological (i.e. underlying) representation phonetic representation impossible word...