This is the most comprehensive book to date on word formation in terms of scope of topics, schools and theoretical positions. All contributions were written by the leading scholars in their respective areas.

This handbook comprises an in-depth presentation of the state of the art in word-formation. The five volumes contain 207 articles written by leading international scholars. The XVI chapters of the handbook provide the reader, in both general articles and individual studies, with a wide variety of perspectives: word-formation as a linguistic discipline (history of science, theoretical concepts), units and processes in word-formation, rules and restrictions, semantics and pragmatics, foreign word-formation, language planning and purism, historical word-formation, word-formation in language acquisition and aphasia, word-formation and language use, tools in word-formation research. The final chapter comprises 74 portraits of word-formation in the individual languages of Europe and offers an innovative perspective. These portraits afford the first overview of this kind and will prove useful for future typological research. This handbook will provide an essential reference for both advanced students and researchers in word-formation and related fields within linguistics.

This is the most comprehensive book to date on word formation in terms of scope of topics, schools and theoretical positions. All contributions were written by the leading scholars in their respective areas.

Although the illustrative material is drawn principally from English, general points are illustrated with a variety of languages to provide a new perspective on a confused and often controversial field of study.

This volume presents a comprehensive survey of the lexicon and word formation processes in contemporary Japanese, with particular emphasis on their typologically characteristic features and their interactions with syntax and semantics. Through contacts with a variety of languages over more than two thousand years of history, Japanese has developed a complex vocabulary system that is composed of four lexical strata: (i) native Japanese, (ii) mimetic, (iii) Sino-Japanese, and (iv) foreign (especially English). This hybrid composition of the lexicon, coupled with the agglutinative character of the language by which morphology is closely associated with syntax, gives rise to theoretically intriguing interactions with word formation processes that are not easily found with inflectional, isolate, or polysynthetic types of languages.

This textbook provides an accessible introduction to the study of word-formation, that is, the ways in which new words are built on the bases of other words (e.g. happy - happy-ness), focusing on English. The book's didactic aim is to enable students with little or no prior linguistic knowledge to do their own practical analyses of complex words. Readers are familiarized with the necessary methodological tools to obtain and analyze relevant data and are shown how to relate their findings to theoretical problems and debates. The book is not written in the perspective of a particular theoretical framework and draws on insights from various research traditions, reflecting important methodological and theoretical developments in the field. It is a textbook directed towards university students of English at all levels. It can also serve as a source book for teachers and advanced students, and as an up-to-date reference concerning many word-formation processes in English.

This book presents a comprehensive review of theoretical work on the linguistics and psycholinguistics of compound words and combines it with a series of surveys of compounding in a variety of languages from a wide range of language families. Compounding is an effective way to create and express new meanings. Compound words are segmentable into their constituents so that new items can often be understood on first presentation. However, as keystone, keynote, and keyboard, and breadboard, sandwich-board, and mortarboard show, the relation between components is often far from straightforward. The question then arises, as to how far compound sequences are analysed at each encounter and how far they are stored in the brain as single lexical items? The nature and processing of compounds thus offer an unusually direct route to how language operates in the mind, as well as providing the means of investigating important aspects of morphology, and lexical semantics, and insights to child language acquisition and the organization of the mental lexicon. This book is the first to report on the state of the art on these and other central topics, including the classification and typology of compounds, and cross-linguistic research on the subject in different frameworks and from synchronic and diachronic perspectives.