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date: 25 February 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter gives a thorough description of the facts of compounding in English, looking not only at those areas of full productivity that have been extensively studied, but also at some compound types which are less productive and less well covered in the literature. It is organized as follows. Section 18.1 gives an overview of the data, considering coordinate, subordinate, and attributive types, as well as marginal types such as phrasal compounds, identical constituent (reduplicative) compounds, dummy compounds, neoclassical compounds, and items whose analysis arguably involves conversion or prefixation rather than compounding. Section 18.2 focuses on issues concerning compounding in English such as headedness, the internal structure of compounds, the locus of inflection, and the presence or absence of linking elements.

Keywords: compounding, compounds, prefixation, headedness, inflection, linking elements

Rochelle Lieber

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).

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