The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology

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.

Laurie Bauer is Professor of Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington. His books include English Word-formation (CUP 1983), Introducing Linguistic Morphology (2nd edn EUP 2003), Morphological Productivity (CUP 2001) and A Glossary of Morphology (EUP 2004). He is one of the editors of the journal Word Structure.

Rochelle Lieber is Professor of Linguistics at the University of New Hampshire and author of Deconstructing Morphology (Chicago 1992), Morphology and Lexical Semantics (CUP 2004), and Introducing Morphology (CUP 2009). She is co-editor with Pavol Stekauer of the Oxford Handbooks of Compounding and Derivational Morphology (OUP 2009 and 2013).

Ingo Plag is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Siegen. His books include Morphological Productivity (Mouton de Gruyter 1999) and Word-formation in English (CUP 2003). He is co-editor of the journal Morphology.