This book aims to reconcile the generative considerations of Jackendoff’s Parallel Architecture (PA) with the European structuralist approach to naming. It shows that there are good reasons to single out word formation as a separate component in PA. It demonstrates that it is a drawback not to distinguish word formation, and explains that the function of word formation rules is different from the function of the lexicon and rules of grammar. After making the argument for a separate word formation component, the book sets out to determine which types of rule qualify as part of this component. Traditionally, the boundaries of word formation with inflection and with syntax have been a matter of debate. By focusing on the naming function, the book poses a guiding principle for determining which rules should be in the word formation component. The position of morphology in the architecture of grammar has always been an issue of debate in generative linguistics. Since Chomsky (1970), this question has been framed in terms of the Lexicalist Hypothesis. Compared to Chomsky’s architectures, Jackendoff’s Parallel Architecture places phonetic and conceptual structures at the same level as syntactic structure, i.e. connected by bidirectional linking rules rather than interpretation rules. One of the consequences is that PA does not formally distinguish lexicon entries from rules of grammar. This changes the setting for the question of the autonomy of morphology, because the Lexicalist Hypothesis depends on this distinction.

In the study of word formation, the focus has often been on generating the form. In this book, the semantic aspect of the formation of new words is central. It is viewed from the perspectives of word formation rules and of lexicalization. An extensive introduction gives a historical overview of the study of the semantics of word formation and lexicalization, explaining how the different theoretical frameworks used in the contributions relate to each other. Each chapter then concentrates on a specific question about a theoretical concept or a word formation process in a particular language and adopts a theoretical framework that is appropriate to the study of this question. From general theoretical concepts of productivity and lexicalization, the focus moves to terminology, compounding, and derivation. Theoretical frameworks discussed include Jackendoff's Conceptual Structure, Langacker's Cognitive Grammar, Lieber's lexical semantic approach to word formation, Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon, Beard's Lexeme-Morpheme-Base Morphology, The onomasiological approach to terminology and word formation.

This volume offers a major reconceptualization of linguistic theory through the lens of morphology, crucially collapsing the distinction between the lexicon and the grammar. This approach accounts for both productive and non-productive morphological phenomena, and moreover integrates linguistic theory into psycholinguistics and human cognition.

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.

The typological, contrastive, and descriptive studies in this volume investigate the strategies employed by the world’s languages to create complex denotations by combining two noun-like elements, together with the kinds of semantic relation they involve, and their acquisition by children. The term ‘binominal lexeme’ is employed to cover both noun-noun compounds and a range of other naming strategies, including prepositional compounds, relational compounds, construct forms, genitival constructions, and more. Overall, the volume suggests a new, cross-linguistic approach to the study of complex lexeme formation that cuts across the traditional boundaries between syntax, morphology, and lexicon.

This book presents the onomasiological approach to word formation and applies it to neoclassical formations, using data taken from English and Russian medical terminology. The phenomenon of neoclassical formations is challenging for morphological theory because it raises questions about determining its boundaries as a distinct category. The difficulties of differentiating between compounding and affixation, between blending and compounding, and between word formation and borrowing represent key problematic areas here. The basic underlying hypothesis considered in this book is that the position of neoclassical formations in English and Russian is different. It will be argued that, whereas in English, neoclassical word formation is a system of word formation, Russian has only individual borrowings. This hypothesis and the theoretical problems it entails are viewed from the perspective of Štekauer’s onomasiological theory of word formation. Štekauer’s theory takes the needs of the speech community as its starting point in explaining word formation. In this theory, the different analyses of neoclassical formations in English and Russian can be accounted for in an intuitively appealing and theoretically elegant way. As naming needs are central, word formation and borrowing can be analysed as alternative responses activating different components of the language system.

Over the last decades, it has been hotly debated whether and how compounds, i.e. word-formations, and phrases differ from each other. The book discusses this issue by investigating compounds and phrases from a structural, semantic-functional and, crucially, cognitive perspective. The analysis focuses on compounds and phrases that are composed of either an adjective and a noun or two nouns in German, French and English. Having distinguished compounds from phrases on structural and semantic-functional grounds, the author claims that compounds are by their nature more appropriate to be stored in the mental lexicon than phrases and supports his argument with empirical evidence from new psycholinguistic studies. In sum, the book maintains the separation between compounds and phrases and reflects upon its cognitive consequences.

New Perspectives in Greek Linguistics is a selection of papers presenting some of the ongoing research in Greek Linguistics. The contributions in this volume, which have their origin in the 4th Athens Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics, refer to various theoretical frameworks and cover a wide range of topics (from phonology of dialects to acquisition of syntax); however, they share the common reference to Greek and Theoretical Linguistics. The second common feature is a tendency to investigate already known problems using new methods, considering different factors from previous research or introducing innovative ideas. The volume is dedicated to Professor Gaberell Drachman and Professor Angeliki Malikouti-Drachman as a small token of gratitude for their ceaseless presence and their contribution to Theoretical Linguistics, to Greek Linguistics and to postgraduate studies in Linguistics in Greece. This volume is of particular interest to linguists working on various areas of Greek Linguistics, especially those who would like to keep up with ongoing research. It presents an opportunity to see the application of linguistic theory in Greek and the current comparative research.

This special issue entitled "New Impulses in Word-Formation" demonstrates in thirteen individual, empirically oriented case studies how the methods gleaned from newer theoretical models (optimality theory, construction grammar, cognitive grammar, distributive morphology, parallel architecture) as well as from the linguistic sub-disciplines of psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, corpus linguistics and computational linguistics can be applied lucratively to the field of word-formation. The individual contributions are from a team of international linguists and deal with a broad spectrum of interests divided almost equally between the two major areas of word-formation, derivation and composition.

Research into cross-linguistic aspects and typology of word-formation has not been paid relevant and systematic attention by morphologists, and only a few articles dealing with various word-formation issues of this kind appear in journals. The chapters in this volume address this issue by discussing, on contrastive principles, important questions of word-formation in a sample of 26 languages. The focus of the book, as a whole, is on typological features of word-formation in the languages sampled. It is aimed at researchers that have an interest in word-formation in a variety of languages.