Word-Formation in English

This book is the second edition of a highly successful introduction to the study of word-formation, that is, the ways in which new words are built on the bases of other words (e.g. happy – happy-ness), focusing on English. The book’s didactic aim is to enable students with little or no prior linguistic knowledge to do their own practical analyses of complex words. Readers are familiarized with the necessary methodological tools to obtain and analyze relevant data and are shown how to relate their findings to theoretical problems and debates. The second edition incorporates new developments in morphology at both the methodological and the theoretical level. It introduces the use of new corpora and data bases, acquaints the reader with state-of-the-art computational algorithms modeling morphology, and brings in current debates and theories.

Author Biography

Ingo Plag is Professor of English Linguistics at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf. He has published extensively in various linguistics journals, is editor-in-chief of the journal Morphology and is a member of the editorial board of a number of international journals including English Language and Linguistics, the Journal of English Linguistics, the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, The Mental Lexicon and Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft. His most recent books are Introduction to English Linguistics (2015), The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology (2013), and Word Knowledge and Word Usage: A Cross-disciplinary Guide to the Mental Lexicon (forthcoming).