Reflections on English Word-Formation

Laurie Bauer is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is the author of many books on linguistics, including The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology (with Lieber and Plag), which won the LSA's Leonard Bloomfield Prize. He won the Royal Society of New Zealand's Humanities medal in 2017.

• Conventions and abbreviations; Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction; Part I. Basic Questions: 2. Reflections on the background to the study of word-formation; 3. Reflections on why we need word-formation; 4. Reflections on the recognition of novelty in words; 5. Reflections on blocking and competition; 6. Reflections on potential and norm; 7. Reflections on definition by stipulation and on word-class; 8. Reflections on analogical word-formation; 9. Reflections on the nature of the lexeme; Part II. Semantic Questions: 10. Reflections on how words mean and what this implies for complex words; 11. Reflections on tautology and redundancy; Part III. Syntactic Questions: 12. Reflections on recursion; 13. Reflections on problems with heads in word-formation; 14. Reflections on coordination in word-formation; Part IV. Interfaces: 15. Reflections on the interface between morphology and phonology: morphophonemics; 16. Reflections on the interface between word-formation and syntax; 17. Reflections on the interface between word-formation and phonetics; 18. Reflections on the interface between word-formation and orthography; 19. Reflections on the interface between word-formation and borrowing patterns of word-formation in English; Part V. Patterns of Word-Formation in English: 20. Reflections on the limits of conversion; 21. Reflections on back-formation; 22. Reflections on coordinative compounds; 23. Reflections on the irregularity of prepositions; 24. Reflections on reduplication; Part VI. Historical Questions: 25. Reflections on dead morphology; 26. Reflections on compounds in English and in wider Germanic; Part VII. Questions Involving Inflection: 27. Reflections on inflection inside word-formation; 28. Reflections on canonical form; 29. Reflections on the spread of regular inflection to simple and derived forms; 30. Conclusion; Indexes.