Heterogeneity in word-formation patterns : a corpus-based analysis of suffixation with -ee and its productivity in English
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Heterogeneity in word-formation patterns : a corpus-based analysis of suffixation with -ee and its productivity in English
(Studies in language companion series / series editors, Werner Abraham, Michael Noonan, v. 118)
J. Benjamins, c2010
- : hb
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Note
Includes bibliographical references and indexes
Description and Table of Contents
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.
Table of 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
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