It is suggested that the label ‘back-formation’ is inaccurate from the point of view of language users, since there is no undoing of linguistic structure. Verbs like houseclean are not back-formations but exist as compounds in the minds of language users.

Various types of construction that have been described as coordinative compounds are discussed, and it is argued that many of them have some other structure.

Much of the theorizing about compounds in English is taken wholesale from studies of other Germanic languages, perhaps particularly German, on the assumption that, as a Germanic language, English has compounds which work in the same way as the compounds in related languages. Yet a close consideration of the ways in which the various languages work and have worked shows that there are important differences, and suggests that we should not be too quick to assume that ‘compound’ means the same thing in all Germanic languages.

Reduplicative patterns are relatively restricted in English, as are their functions. As well as outlining the patterns, and introducing a new pattern, this chapter considers the ways in which these structures are used.

Recursiveness is one of the features of the syntactic structure of any language, and morphology also shows recursiveness, even if it is strongly restricted, and the way in which it operates is not the same across all kinds of morphological structure. A new way of considering recursion in suffixation is proposed.

This chapter provides a comprehensive account of UX writing as a contemporary domain of elite language work. I first discuss existing literature on UX writing, showing that while scholars have discussed at large how users interact with digital media, there is considerably less work on how language is used by producers. After this brief survey, I offer an in-depth introduction to UX writing in three parts. First, I provide a broad mapping of the profession, where I discuss the history and origins of UX writing. Next, I give an introduction to UX writers’ language work, illustrating how their work is both centrally concerned with writing interface texts and much more complex than that. Finally, I turn to some initial ethnographic observations about UX writers’ concrete text production. In this last regard, I am particularly interested in how UX writers mobilize (meta)linguistic knowledge in their work, arguing that they are not just language workers but also language experts. Overall, the chapter thus offers a first description of the work and profession of UX writers, orienting primarily to these wordsmiths’ own views and understandings of what it is that they do.

A widely accepted principle in morphological studies is that inflectional affixes should not be found between a root and a derivational affix or internally in a compound. Many of the apparent exceptions to this general principle in English can be argued not to be genuinely exceptional, but some types, including an innovative type, appear to contradict the usual patterns, though it is not clear why this should be the case.

In summarizing the book, this chapter reconsiders some of the major recurrent issues that have been covered, issues such as the notion of a rule of word-formation, productivity and the difficulty in dealing with genuine examples from usage. There has also been a focus on understanding where the boundaries of categories lie. It is stressed that the questions that are discussed here could equally be discussed in books which focus on other aspects of language study, and that word-formation is just one area in which these issues can be tackled.

This final, concluding chapter of the book offers a reflection on what the production of digital media reveals about the cultural politics of these technologies. Drawing together the threads developed in the previous chapters, and especially UX writers’ own theorizations of language, I discuss the normative dimensions of interface design and make the case for a posthumanist approach to language in digital media interfaces. My central argument is simple: regardless of how people choose to use digital media, the software itself always posits an ideal way of using it – it entails an inbuilt ideal users have to respond to, even if that response is to contest the norm the software produces. In this way, focusing on the production of interface texts provides a valuable perspective on the broader cultural politics of digital media by theorizing UX writers, software, and users as part of a complex sociotechnical assemblage rather than as individual, disconnected agents.