The Oxford Handbook of Compounding
Edited by Rochelle Lieber and Pavol Štekauer
Abstract
This book presents a comprehensive review of theoretical work on the linguistics and psycholinguistics of compound words and combines it with a series of surveys of compounding in a variety of languages from a wide range of language families. Compounding is an effective way to create and express new meanings. Compound words are segmentable into their constituents so that new items can often be understood on first presentation. However, as keystone, keynote, and keyboard, and breadboard, sandwich-board, and mortarboard show, the relation between components is often far from straightforward. The question then arises as to how far compound sequences are analysed at each encounter and how far they are stored in the brain as single lexical items. The nature and processing of compounds thus offer an unusually direct route to how language operates in the mind, as well as providing the means of investigating important aspects of morphology and lexical semantics, and insights to child language acquisition and the organization of the mental lexicon. The book reports on the state of the art in these and other central topics, including the classification and typology of compounds, and approaches to cross-linguistic research on the subject from generative and non-generative, and synchronic and diachronic perspectives.
Keywords:
psycholinguistics,
compound sequences,
single lexical items,
compounds,
compounding,
morphology,
lexical semantics,
child language acquisition,
mental lexicon,
cross-linguistic research
Bibliographic Information
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- Print Publication Date:
- Jul 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199695720
- Published online:
- Sep 2012
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199695720.001.0001
Editors
Rochelle Lieber,
editor
Rochelle Lieber is Professor of Linguistics at the University of New Hampshire. Her interests include morphological theory, especially derivation and compounding, lexical semantics, and the morphology-syntax interface. She is the author of several books: On the Organization of the Lexicon (IULC, 1981), An Integrated Theory of Autosegmental Processes (State University of New York Press, 1987), Deconstructing Morphology (University of Chicago Press, 1992), Morphology and Lexical Semantics (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and Introducing Morphology (Cambridge University Press, 2010). She is the co-author, with Laurie Bauer and Ingo Plag of the Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology (Oxford University Press, 2013). Together with Pavol Štekauer she has edited two handbooks, the Handbook of Word Formation (Springer, 2005) and the Oxford Handbook of Compounding (Oxford University Press, 2009).
Pavol Štekauer,
editor
Pavol Štekauer is Professor of English linguistics at P.J. Šafárik University, Košice, Slovakia. His research has focused on an onomasiological approach to word-formation, sociolinguistic aspects of word-formation, meaning predictability of complex words, and crosslinguistic research into wotrd-formation. He is the author of A Theory of Conversion in English (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996), An Onomasiological Theory of English Word-Formation (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1998), English Word-Formation. A History of Research (1960-1995). Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2000), and Meaning Predictability in Word-Formation (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins). He co-edited (with Rochelle Lieber) Handbook of Word-formation (Springer 2005) and Oxford Handbook of Compounding (OUP 2009).
