Morphological Productivity: Structural Constraints in English Derivation (Topics in English Linguistics, 28)

This book deals with one of the central problems for theories of word-formation, the productivity of morphological processes. The productivity of these processes is assessed, using both text-based and dictionary - based measures (Cobuild corpus vs. Oxford English Dictionary). Implementing Optimality Theory and Jackendorff's Lexical Conceptual Semantics, a large number of 20th century neologisms extracted from the OED are investigated with regard to their phonological, morphological and semantic characteristics. On the theoretical level the proposed analysis presents evidence against the separation of meaning and form in derivational morphology and for a sign-based, output-oriented model instead.