Construction Morphology

This book shows how complex words and word-like phrasal lexical units can be analyzed as constructions, as pairings of forms, and meanings. It contributes to current work on the architecture of the grammar, the morphology-syntax interface, the shape and characteristics of the lexicon, and the analysis of grammaticalization phenomena. It is an important work for morphological theory in particular and for linguistic theory in general.

Geert Booij applies the insights of construction grammar to morphological theory and the formation of words and lexical phrases. Construction grammar refers to the class of linguistic theories that focus on the pairing of form and meaning at different levels of abstraction. Such work (by William Croft and Adele Goldberg, for example) has tended to focus on syntax or (as in the case of Ray Jackendoff) on the syntax-semantics interface. Booij offers a characteristically lucid integration of his own and others' work and considers what it reveals about the nature of words and idioms. His book will appeal to professional linguists in all subfields and to graduate students of syntax and morphology.

Geert Booij has been Professor of Linguistics at the University of Leiden since 2005, and a former Dean of the Faculty of Arts. He was previously Professor of General Linguistics and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the Free University of Amsterdam. His books include The Phonology of Dutch (OUP, 1995); with Ariane van Santen, Morfologie: De Woordstructuur van het Nederlands (Amsterdam University Press, 1995, second edn 1998); with Ch. Lehmann and J. Mugdan (eds.), Morphology: An International Handbook of Inflection and Word Formation. 2 volumes (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2000-2); The Morphology of Dutch (OUP, 2002), and The Grammar of Words: An Introduction to Linguistic Morphology (OUP, 2005; 2nd edn 2007). He is one of the founders and editors of the Yearbook of Morphology (1988-2005) and its successor, the Journal Morphology.