This is the first volume specifically dedicated to competition in inflection and word-formation, a topic that has increasingly attracted attention. Semantic categories, such as concepts, classes, and feature bundles, can be expressed by more than one form or formal pattern. This departure from the ideal principle "one form – one meaning" is particularly frequent in morphology, where it has been treated under diverse headings, such as blocking, Elsewhere Condition, Pāṇini's Principle, rivalry, synonymy, doublets, overabundance, suppletion and other terms. Since these research traditions, despite the heterogeneous terminology, essentially refer to the same underlying problems, this volume unites the phenomena studied in this field of linguistic morphology under the more general heading of competition. The volume features an extensive state of the art report on the subject and 11 research papers, which represent various theoretical approaches to morphology and address a wide range of aspects of competition, including morphophonology, lexicology, diachrony, language contact, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics and language acquisition.

This volume focuses on a number of interrelated issues in the theorizing and interpretation of morphological rivalry, including the differences between a semasiological and an onomasiological approach to competition phenomena in word-formation, the scope of such phenomena (micro-level rivalry between individual affixes, as well as macro-level competition between different processes), the different sources of competition, and the possible resolutions of competitive situations. An overview of existing research in the field is provided, as well as new, cutting-edge findings and proposals for analytical innovation. Linguistic data are drawn from European and Asian languages, and morphologists, semanticists, and anyone interested in the dynamics of language will be stimulated by the analytical models and explanations offered in the 11 chapters.

Drawing on detailed case studies across a range of languages, including English, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Czech, Russian, Lithuanian and Greek, this book examines the different factors that determine the outcome of the interaction between borrowing and word formation. Historically, borrowing has largely been studied from etymological and lexicographical perspectives and word formation has been included in morphology. However, this book focuses on their mutual influence and interaction. Bringing together a range of contributors, each chapter illustrates how borrowing and word formation are in competition as alternative naming processes, while also showing how they can influence each other. The case studies are framed by an introduction that describes the general background and a conclusion that summarises the main findings.

This volume brings together contributions whose aim is to discuss the nature of paradigms in derivational morphology and compounding in the light of evidence from various languages.

The focus of Paradigms in Word Formation: Theory and applications is on the relevance of paradigms for linguistic description. Paradigmatic organization has traditionally been considered an inherent feature of inflectional morphology, but research in the last decades clearly shows the existence of paradigms in word formation, especially in affixal derivation, often at the expense of other word-formation processes. This volume seeks to address the role that paradigms may play in the description of compounding, conversion and participles. This volume should be of interest to anyone specialized in the field of English morphology and word formation.

This volume brings together cutting-edge research on the semantic properties of derived words and the processes by which these words are derived. To this day, many of these processes remain under-researched and the nature of meaning in derivational morphology remains ill-understood. All eight articles have an empirical focus and rely on carefully collected sets of data. At the same time, the contributions represent a broad variety of approaches. Several contributions deal with specific problems of the pairing of form and meaning, such as the rivalry between nominalizing suffixes or the semantic categories encoded by conversion pairs. Other articles tackle the more general question of how meaning is organized, e.g. whether there is evidence for the paradigmatic organization of derived words or the reality of the inflection-derivation dichotomy. The contributions feature innovative methodologies, such as representing lexical meaning as word distribution or predicting semantic properties by means of analogical algorithms. This volume offers new and highly interesting insights into how complex words mean, and offers directions for future research in an oft-neglected field.

This book provides a view of where the field of morphology has been and where it is today within a particular theoretical framework, gathering up new and representative work in morphology by both eminent and emerging scholars, and touching on a very wide range of topics, approaches, and theoretical points of view. These seemingly disparate articles have a common touchstone in their focus on a word-based, paradigmatic approach to morphology. The chapters in this book elaborate on these basic themes, from the further exploration of paradigms, to studies involving words, stems, and affixes, to examinations of competition, inheritance, and defaults, to investigations of morphomes, to ways that morphology interacts with other parts of the language from phonology to sociolinguistics and applied linguistics. The editors and contributors dedicate this volume to Prof. Mark Aronoff for his profound influence on the field.