This chapter covers morphological productivity. We first look at the main factors that contribute to or detract from productivity, including transparency, compositionality, and usefulness. We review types of restrictions on word formation rules including categorial, phonological, syntactic, semantic, and etymological restrictions.Students consider the difficulty of measuring productivity and learn to calculate productivity using Baayen’s P formula. We then take a historical perspective and look at changes to productivity over time. The chapter ends with a consideration of the distinction between morphological productivity and morphological creativity.

This chapter considers the borderline between morphology and syntax and the ways in which morphology and syntax interact with each other. We begin with a look at the ways in which morphology can affect the valency or argument structure of sentences, considering passives and anti-passives, which decrease valency, and causatives and applicatives, which increase valency. We then go on to look at processes of noun incorporation and cliticization and at phrasal verbs, verbs with separable prefixes, and so-called phrasal compounds. The chapter concludes with alook at morphological versus syntactic (periphrastic) expression in English comparatives and superlatives.

In this chapter we consider the interaction of morphology and phonology. We begin with a look at allomorphy, distinguishing predictible allomorphy, partially predictable allomorphy, and idiosyncratic or unpredictable allomorphy. Students learn to look for phonological rules that create predictable allomorphy. Students are introduced to the ways in which the syllable structure of a language can interact with its morphology. Students are also introduced to the idea of lexical strata, looking at differences in behavior between various English derivational affixes. This chapter also includes a ‘how to’ section on analyzing morphologically induced phonological rules.

In this chapter students are exposed to various kinds of inflectional processes in the languages of the world. We start with a review of the distinction between inflection and derivation. We then look at the inflectional categories of number, person, gender and noun class, case, tense and aspect, voice, mood and modality, evidentiality and mirativity. We look at the sorts of inflection we find in English and consider why English has so little inflection. We then turn to the concepts of the paradigm and of inflectional classes, and look at the sorts of relations that are found in paradigms (syncretism, suppletion, defectiveness, overabundance). Students learn the distinction between inherent and contextual inflection. The chapter ends with a brief ‘how-to’ on the analysis of inflection.

This chapter offers a first introduction to morphological theory by looking at several important theoretical debates. We begin by looking at the nature of morphological rules through the lens oftwo models: Item and Arrangement versus Item and Process models. We then consider the issue of lexical integrity, whether rules of syntax and rules of morphology can interact with each other. We consider the problem of blocking, competition, and affix rivalry. We also look at various ways of characterizing constraints on the ordering of affixes. We go on to look at the subject of bracketing paradoxes. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the nature of affixal polysemy.

This chapter begins with brief descriptions of the morphological systems that are found in five languages: Turkish, Mandarin Chinese, Samoan, Latin, and Nishnaabemwin. We go on to look at both traditional and contemporary ways of characterizing the morphological systems of languages. Students are introduced to the traditional characterization of languages as isolating, agglutinating, fusional, or polysynthetic, and we look at the ways in which this fourfold classification presents difficulties. We then consider more contemporary ways of comparing the morphology of the languages of the world such as the Indexes of Synthesis, Fusion, and Exponence. Students are also introduced to the notion of head- versus dependent-marking. The chapter ends with a brief consideration of genetic and areal tendencies in morphology and of typological change.

This chapter introduces students to the study of morphology. We look in a preliminary way at the difficulty inherent in defining what we mean by a word and introduce the term morpheme. We introduce the basic concepts of simple versus complex words. Students learn the distinction between word tokens, word types, and lexemes. We end with a brief introduction to the difference between inflection and derivation.

This paper discusses synthetic compounds in Polish, focusing on compound nouns which contain either a deverbal suffixal derivative or a nominalized verb stem as their right-hand constituent. Competition is investigated between such right-headed morphological compounds and left-headed phrasal nouns consisting of a head noun followed by its genitive attribute. Furthermore, Polish compound nouns are compared, in respect of their productivity and their semantic interpretation, with Japanese compound nouns headed by nominalized verb stems, and with English synthetic compounds. Examples are provided (on the basis of the National Corpus of Polish and Google searches) of non-institutionalized Polish compound nouns (with agentive or event reading) which can be viewed as forming semantic niches (in the sense of Hüning 2009), extendable through analogy. It is argued that the framework of Construction Morphology (as outlined by Booij 2010), with its postulation of low-level construction schemas, can provide an appropriate account of the process of analogical compound formation in Polish.

This paper examines the distribution of non-active Voice morphology on intransitive variants of prefixed verbs in Greek. It is shown that such verbs bear internal prefixes and are causative and transitive. Their intransitive variants bear non-active morphology obligatorily undergoing a process of detransitivization. It is further shown that this holds also for reflexive marking in Romance (Catalan and French). This is due to a reanalysis of the particle system of the languages under discussion, according to which internal prefixes have been reanalyzed and cannot be morphophonologically separated from the verbal stem. This suggests that all three languages changed from a more lexeme-like type of prefix system (Bauer 2003) to a system where prefixes are void of spatial semantic content and seem to function as transitivity markers.

The formation of new words ending in free(e.g. costfree, glutenfree, and troublefree) has become highly productive since the turn of the millennium. The new suffix free has found an ecological niche that is distinct from that of its rival -less: expressions of the form Xfree have developed a new sense quite distinct from those of the rival form Xless. We demonstrate our claim by comparing internet citations of existing words of the form Xless with equivalent new words of the form Xfree.

While conversion is assumed to be a word-formation process, at least in lexicalist theories, Dirven (1999) describes it as event-schema metonymy in a cognitive framework. Successive works suggest that this approach, which was initiated by Kövecses & Radden (1998), has not been further pursued beyond cognitive grammar. Only recently, Bauer (2018) resumed Dirven’s line of reasoning and provided convincing arguments in favour of a metonymic description of noun-to-verb conversion. The aim of the present article is to elucidate the asymmetry involved in event-schema metonymy. Since the salient participant is selected from a set of equals (i.e. from a set of participants competing to be selected as the metonymic vehicle), the question arises of what makes this participant – which contrary to the principle of anthropocentrism is not typically the Agent – stand out against its competitors. Based on selected denominal verbs especially from English, but also from Mandarin Chinese, it will be shown that this asymmetry is optimally accounted for by the abstract principle of ‘prominence’ in the sense of Himmelmann and Primus (2015) and Jasinskaja et al. (2015).

Meyer-Lübke and his followers attributed the instrumental function of Romance deverbal nouns in -one to the metaphorical extension of corresponding agent nouns. In the present contribution, I argue that no such extension has ever taken place. Rather, the instrumental function has been inherited from Latin and extended analogically in a small number of semantic niches. Reanalysis of denominal nouns in -one relatable to verbal bases may also have been at stake in some instances.

Much of contemporary linguistics presumes that affixes are monomorphemic. I discuss the opposite perspective, according to which complex affixes may themselves arise through the conflation of simpler affixes. The evidence in favor of this perspective is extensive and varied. As I show, this includes evidence of the following sorts: an affix may be paradigmatically opposed to a combination of affixes; two affixes may overlap in both their form and the content that they express; an affix’s alignment may vary according to whether it is alone or accompanied by some other affix; the content expressed by a combination of affixes may not be directly deducible from the content of those individual affixes; and the appearance of an affix in some word form may depend on the presence of a more peripheral affix in that word form. I explain the theoretical significance of this evidence with particular attention to its implications for developing an inferential-realizational theory of inflectional morphology.