Word-formation in European languages

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lívia Körtvélyessy ◽  
Pavol Štekauer ◽  
Ján Genči ◽  
Július Zimmermann
Keyword(s):  
Word Formation ◽  
Formation Processes ◽  
Language Family ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Formation Systems

The main goal of the paper is to analyze and evaluate the nature and the role of word-formation systems in a sample of 73 European languages. The basis for the comparison is 100 word-formation features representing 12 word-formation processes. The data is used to examine (a) the structural richness of word-formation systems at the level of individual languages, language genera, families and the linguistic area of Europe, and (b) the parameter of Maximum Feature Occurrence that identifies those word-formation features that are present in all languages under consideration, i.e., in all languages of a genus, a family or a linguistic area of Europe. In the latter case, it identifies the so-called Euroversals. From the diachronic perspective, the paper evaluates the degree of diversification of languages belonging to the same language genus and language family.

Appositive compounds in dialectal and sociolinguistic varieties of French

2020 ◽  
pp. 326-346
Author(s):  
Brigitte L. M. Bauer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Data Analysis ◽  
Geographic Variation ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Underlying Structure ◽  
Formation Processes ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Different Types

Over the last 100 years, appositive compounding—combining two nouns in apposition—has become one of the most productive word formation processes in French. In an attempt to account for this dramatic spread and building on existing diachronic research, this article examines the occurrence of appositive compounds in non-standard French during the twentieth century, in a number of Gallo-Romance dialects and in Poilu, a sociolect from the early twentieth century, bringing together historical, dialectal, and sociolinguistic data. Analysis includes the identification of the different types of appositive compound and their underlying structure. Moreover word order patterns and their potential geographic correlates will be investigated as well as the role of metaphors and metonymy. Data reflecting geographic variation and sociolinguistic stratification will thus help to determine what factors were at play in the expansion of appositive compounding in contemporary French.

A morphosemantic investigation of term formation processes in English and Spanish

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesús Fernández-Domínguez
Keyword(s):  
Olive Oil ◽  
Oil Industry ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Formation Processes ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
Similarities And Differences

Driven by a shortage of studies on the morphosemantics of word-formation from a contrastive perspective, this article examines 200 English and Spanish terms from the olive oil industry with the aim of shedding light on their linguistic nature. This is achieved by use of a corpus which makes it possible to retrieve the units and their contexts from specialised texts. Besides considering the derivational features of the relevant terminogenesic processes, this investigation considers their semantic characteristics and connects the terms’ formal and meaning aspects. This, in turn, allows observing the close relationship between morphology and semantics in terminological spheres, which is directly linked with the role of these units as a tool for specialised communication. Once the morphosemantic features of the terms have been fully accounted for in English and Spanish individually, a comparison is drawn between the two languages in order to spot and describe similarities and differences.

scholarly journals Reduplication in Kurukh: A Study in Word-formation Processes and Vocabulary Acquisition

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 120
Author(s):  
Alisha Vandana Lakra ◽  
Md. Mojibur Rahman
Keyword(s):  
Formation Process ◽  
Vocabulary Acquisition ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Formation Processes ◽  
New Words ◽  
Diachronic Study

Change is the nature of every  living language for better communication. These changes can be phonological, morphological, syntactical and lexical, because of various linguistic affects. The synchronic and diachronic study of language proves that it enriches the vocabulary of the language. Another reason for the enrichment of vocabulary is through morphological word formation process which are mainly inflectional, derivational, compounding and reduplication, etc. Reduplication is implicit to phonological (sounds and prosodic units) and morphological (word constituents) components. It occurs in many languages and helps in the formation of new words. The present study concentrates on the process of reduplication Kurukh and the role of reduplication  in acquiring vocabulary.

scholarly journals Word Formation in Japanese

Linguistics ◽  
2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taro Kageyama
Keyword(s):  
Word Formation ◽  
Formation Processes ◽  
Complicated System ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Broad Term ◽  
Good Potential ◽  
Nonconcatenative Morphology ◽  
Complex Words

The term “word formation” is used here as a broad term covering a wide array of word formation processes and morphological issues related to syntax and semantics. The reason Japanese is specifically focused on is that this language, though lacking a complicated system of agreement-based inflections and declensions that are common to inflectional and polysynthetic types of languages, is rich in word formation processes that straddle the boundaries of morphology, syntax, semantics, and phonology and is therefore considered to have good potential to contribute toward theorizing the place of morphology in the overall architecture of grammatical modules. Japanese has a wealth of concatenative and nonconcatenative word formation processes that produce complex words by compounding, affixation, conversion, inflection, blending, clipping, and other mechanisms, which are often conditioned by differences of lexical strata (native, Sino-Japanese, foreign, and mimetic). This article chiefly treats concatenative morphology, with brief reference to nonconcatenative morphology. Besides, the agglutinative character of Japanese makes it difficult to identify “words” in a unitary manner as in European languages. Defining the notion of “word” is also a key issue in mulling over the word formation phenomena in this language.

How to Live with External Evidence in Phonology: A Note on the Challenge of Interference

1988 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 423-429 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rajendra Singh
Keyword(s):  
Word Formation ◽  
Formation Processes ◽  
External Evidence ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
Phonological Rules

As far as phonology and morphology are concerned, the available evidence indicates that the role of L1 in shaping interlanguage is confined to those of its rules that are needed to account for its global alternations, alternations that are independent of its morphology (cf. Cearly 1974, Dressler 1985, Kilbury 1981, Singh and Ford 1982, 1987, Singh and Martohardjono 1989, Wode 1978, and Wurzel 1977, among others). The rules needed to account for the local, morphologically dependent alternations of L1 or the ones needed to account for its word-formation processes do not play such a role. Interference, in other words, can be caused only by across-the-board phonological rules of L1. So-called morphophonemic rules of L1 do not cause it, and morphological interference from L1 seems not to exist as word-formation errors in intermorphology are the results of illegal extensions of L2 word-formation rules (cf. Singh 1989 and Singh and Martohardjono 1989). The purpose of this note is to critically examine the accounts contemporary theories of phonology provide of this state of affairs and to argue that the account provided by the sort of theory proposed in Ford and Singh (1983, 1985a, 1985b) and Singh and Ford (1982, 1987) is the most satisfactory one.

scholarly journals Metaphor and metonymy in word formation

2006 ◽  
Vol 22 (spe) ◽  
pp. 67-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margarida Basilio
Keyword(s):  
Word Formation ◽  
Formation Processes ◽  
Metaphor And Metonymy

This work investigates the relevance of analogy, metonymy and metaphor in word formation patterns and their products. Initially, the semantic side of proportional analogy in morphological restructuring is analyzed. The work then concentrates on the role of metonymy in the formation of instrumentals and agent nouns. The last part of the work is dedicated to the role of metaphor in compounding. The main point of the paper is to show how metaphor is fundamental to the constitution of the lexicon and, consequently, how unfortunate for the discussion of metaphor in language is the relative disregard to word-formation processes.

scholarly journals Derivational Morphology of Assamese Lexical Word Categories

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Palash Das ◽  
Madhumita Barbora
Keyword(s):  
Word Formation ◽  
Formation Processes ◽  
Derivational Morphology ◽  
Spell Checker ◽  
Derivational Morphemes

Word formation by derivation is very productive in Assamese. A significant amount of words in Assamese owe their origin to derivation. The analysis in this paper takes into account the derivational processes related with lexical word categories, and, numerous bound morphemes that are used in the derivational process in the language. This analysis helps us to understand some of the important aspects of Assamese morphology. These aspects are - role of class maintaining and class changing morphemes, derivation of word from synonyms, productivity of derivational morphemes, morphophonemic changes in root as a result of affixation of derivational morphemes, presence of allomorphs of various bound morphemes, ability of a morpheme to derive words from different word categories. The significance of this papers lies in the fact that  these  word formation processes could help develop morphological rules that can be used for developing computational morphological tools like- stemmer, spell checker, tagger etc.

Innu (Algonquian)

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn Drapeau
Keyword(s):  
Rocky Mountains ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Formation Processes ◽  
Language Family ◽  
The Way

This chapter is devoted to Innu (aka Montagnais), a member of the Algonquian language family, spoken by roughly 13,000 people in eleven communities scattered over Northeastern Québec and Labrador in Canada. The language forms part of the Cree-Innu-Naskapi dialect continuum (Quebec and Labrador) with ties to the other Cree dialects spoken west of Québec, all the way to the Rocky Mountains in Alberta.The chapter aims at providing a broad description of the main features of the language from a functional typological viewpoint with special emphasis on the aspects that are of interest to the study of polysynthesis (head-marking, word-formation processes including incorporation of nominals, identification of participants on the verb, and the referentiality of incorporated nominals).

scholarly journals Intensificatory Tautology in the History of English: A Corpus-based Study

2021 ◽  
pp. 007542422199909
Author(s):  
Victorina González-Díaz
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Formation Processes ◽  
Structural Reorganization ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Noun

This paper explores the development and establishment of intensificatory tautology (specifically, size-adjective clusters, e.g., “ great big plans,” “ little tiny room”) in the history of English. The analysis suggests that size-adjective clusters appear in the Late Middle English period as a result of the functional-structural reorganization of the English noun phrase. It is only towards the end of the Early Modern English period that they start to become (relatively) productive in the language, and in Present-Day English that they acquire a wide(r) intensifying functional range (i.e., adjective modifier, emphasizer, degree intensifier) and become associated with informal, spoken-based registers. More broadly, the paper suggests that more research is needed as regards the role of collocation in processes of intensifier creation in the noun phrase and, more generally, as regards how collocation interacts with word-formation processes in this context.

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