The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology

The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology is intended as a companion volume to the Oxford Handbook of Compounding (OUP 2009), aiming to provide a comprehensive and thorough overview of the study of derivational morphology. Written by distinguished scholars, its 41 chapters are devoted to theoretical and definitional matters, formal and semantic issues, interdisciplinary connections, and detailed descriptions of derivational processes in a wide range of language families. It presents the reader with the current state of the art in the study of derivational morphology.

The handbook begins with an overview and a consideration of definitional matters, distinguishing derivation from inflection on the one hand and compounding on the other. From a formal perspective, the handbook treats affixation (prefixation, suffixation, infixation, circumfixation, etc.), conversion, reduplication, root and pattern and other templatic processes, as well as prosodic and subtractive means of forming new words. From a semantic perspective, it looks at the processes that form various types of adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and verbs, as well as evaluatives and the rarer processes that form function words. Chapters are devoted to issues of theory, methodology, the historical development of derivation, and to child language acquisition, sociolinguistic, experimental, and psycholinguistic approaches. The second half of the book surveys derivation in fifteen language families that are widely dispersed in terms of both geographical location and typological characteristics. It ends with a consideration of both areal tendencies in derivation and the issue of universals.

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 including Morphology and Lexical Semantics (CUP, 2004), andIntroducing Morphology (CUP, 2010). She is the co-author, with Laurie Bauer and Ingo Plag, of theOxford Reference Guide to English Morphology (OUP, 2013).

Pavol Stekauer is Professor of English linguistics at P.J. Safarik University, Koice, 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 word-formation. His publications includeAn Onomasiological Theory of English Word-Formation (John Benjamins, 1998),English Word-Formation. A History of Research (1960-1995). Gunter Narr, 2000), andMeaning Predictability in Word-Formation (John Benjamins, 2005).

Rochelle Lieber and Pavol ?tekauer are co-editors of two handbooks: The Handbook of Word-formation (Springer, 2005) andThe Oxford Handbook of Compounding (OUP, 2009).