English Word-Formation

English Word-Formation is a 1983 book by Laurie Bauer in which the author considers the relationship between word-formation and other areas of linguistics without trying to provide a fully-fledged theory of word-formation.[1]

English Word-Formation
AuthorLaurie Bauer
LanguageEnglish
Subjectword formation
PublisherCambridge University Press
Publication date
1983
ISBN9780521284929

The book has been credited as the "first detailed study of Present-Day English word-formation".[2]

Content

The book is composed of nine chapters in which he discusses English word-formation as well as what Bauer sees as its main problem areas, which he defines as including restricted productivity,[3] lexicalization, syntax, and semantics. English Word-Formation begins with an introduction section and moves into its next chapter, which discusses some basic concepts. From there the chapters discuss productivity, phonological issues in word-formation, syntactic and semantic issues in word-formation, an outline of English word-formation, and theory and practice before coming to the book's conclusion.[4]

Reception

István Kenesei reviewed the book in 1985 for Studies in Language, where he criticized the book as not living up to the criteria of other books published through the Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics line, which he felt was "partly out of sheer ill fortune, but mostly because of the failure of the approach he has chosen."[5] Scholar Susanne Mühleisen has also criticized English Word-Formation as "[resting] on rather thin and arbitrary data".[6]

In contrast, Dieter Kastovsky praised English Word-Formation as the best introduction of the English word-formation at the time, praising it as an "extensive and critical survey of the state of the art".[7]

References
  1. Taylor, Talbot J. (1985). "Review of English Word-Formation". The Review of English Studies. 36 (143): 389–390. ISSN 0034-6551. JSTOR 516037.
  2. Müller, Peter O.; Ohnheiser, Ingeborg; Olsen, Susan; Rainer, Franz (2015-09-14). Word-Formation: An International Handbook of the Languages of Europe. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. p. 1916. ISBN 9783110375732.
  3. Plag, Ingo (2012-10-25). Morphological Productivity: Structural Constraints in English Derivation. Walter de Gruyter. p. 1. ISBN 9783110802863.
  4. Bauer, Laurie (1983). "English Word-Formation by Laurie Bauer". Cambridge Core. Retrieved 2019-06-23.
  5. Kenesei, István (1985). "Laurie Bauer, English Word-formation (review)". Studies in Language. 9 (3): 429–438. doi:10.1075/sl.9.3.09ken.
  6. Muehleisen, Susanne (2010). Heterogeneity in Word-formation Patterns: A Corpus-based Analysis of Suffixation with -ee and Its Productivity in English. John Benjamins Publishing. pp. 9–10. ISBN 9789027205858.
  7. Kastovsky, Dieter (1 January 1986). "English word-formation: Bauer, Laurie. London: Cambridge University Press, 1982, 311 pp., £7.50". System. 14 (3): 349–353. doi:10.1016/0346-251X(86)90032-1. ISSN 0346-251X.


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.