The range of meanings expressed by derivatives formed by the attachment of the four principal verb-forming suffixes - ate, - en, - ify and - ize has been the subject of extensive analysis for over two decades. From a descriptive perspective, the research reported in this volume constitutes the most comprehensive usage-based analysis of verbal derivatives available to date and provides register-based and diachronic comparisons of usage and distribution patterns across corpora of spoken English. The semantic analysis adopts the seven well-established semantic categories of verbal derivatives and extends the set to twenty by including further meaning classes documented in the morphological literature and additional senses that emerged from the contextualized analysis of complex verbs in the datasets. From a theoretical standpoint, the novel approach involves the explicit linking of affix schemas to argument structure constructions, and proposes a unified model of verb-forming suffixation that accounts for the multi-functional characteristics of verbal derivatives, from a constructional perspective.

This volume focuses on detailed studies of various aspects of Construction Morphology, and combines theoretical analysis and descriptive detail. It deals with data from several domains of linguistics and contributes to an integration of findings from various subdisciplines of linguistics into a common model of the architecture of language. It presents applications and extensions of the model of Construction Morphology to a wide range of languages. Construction Morphology is one of the theoretical paradigms in present-day morphology. It makes use of concepts of Construction Grammar for the analysis of word formation and inflection. Complex words are seen as constructions, that is, pairs of form and meaning. Morphological patterns are accounted for by construction schemas. These are the recipes for coining new words and word forms, and they motivate the properties of existing complex words. Both schemas and individual words are stored, and hence there is no strict separation of lexicon and grammar. In addition to abstract schemas there are subschemas for subclasses of complex words with specific properties. This architecture of the grammar is in harmony with findings from other empirical domains of linguistics such as language acquisition, word processing, and language change.

Warrongo is an extinct Australian Aboriginal language that used to be spoken in northeast Australia. This volume is largely based on the rich data recorded from the last fluent speaker. It details the phonology, morphology and syntax of the language. In particular, it provides a truly scrutinizing description of syntactic ergativity - a phenomenon that is rare among the world's language. It also shows that, unlike some other Australian languages, Warrongo has noun phrases that are configurational. Overall this volume shows what can be documented of a language that has only one speaker.

The book traces the evolution of the English verb-particle construction (‘phrasal verb’) from Indo-European and Germanic up to the present. A contrastive survey of the basic semantic and syntactic characteristics of verb-particle constructions in the present-day Germanic languages shows that the English construction is structurally unremarkable and its analysis as a periphrastic word-formation is proposed. From a cross-linguistic and comparative perspective the Old English prefix verbs are identified as preverbs and the shift towards postposition of the particles is connected to the development of more general patterns of word order. The interplay of phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic factors in the loss of the native prefixes in the history of English is investigated. In this context the question is discussed to what extent the older prefixes were replaced by particles and borrowed prefixes, how the characteristic etymological and semantic properties of the Modern English phrasal verbs can be explained and what role they play in the lexicon. The author argues that their common perception as particularly ‘English’, ‘colloquial’ and ‘informal’ has its origin in the eighteenth-century normative tradition.

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 volume offers a critical examination of the construction of the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (Spoken BNC2014) and points the way forward toward a more informed understanding of corpus linguistic methodology more broadly. The book begins by situating the creation of this second corpus, a compilation of new, publicly-accessible Spoken British English from the 2010s, within the context of the first, created in 1994, talking through the need to balance backward capability and optimal practice for today’s users. Chapters subsequently use the Spoken BNC2014 as a focal point around which to discuss the various considerations taken into account in corpus construction, including design, data collection, transcription, and annotation. The volume concludes by reflecting on the successes and limitations of the project, as well as the broader utility of the corpus in linguistic research, both in current examples and future possibilities. This exciting new contribution to the literature on linguistic methodology is a valuable resource for students and researchers in corpus linguistics, applied linguistics, and English language teaching.

This textbook is an accessible introduction to both English phonology and phonology in general. It analyzes some central phenomena of the sound system of two standard varieties of English, Southern British English and General American. The framework adopted is Cognitive Linguistics and Construction Grammar, and this entails in particular that all the elements of the sound system are tightly interwoven with the meaningful units: morphemes, words, phrases and sentences. The book contains chapters on articulatory phonetics, sounds and meaning, alternation patterns, word stress and intonation. Each chapter ends with an invitation to analyze English and other languages with the tools of Cognitive Linguistics. The book is designed for students as well as teachers of English and linguistics, and while the target readership should already have a background in linguistics, a beginner in phonology will find all the basic concepts clearly defined.