Foreword: New territories in word-formation
Word-formation is a domain of linguistics which has steadily evolved in the last decades under the influence of the wide availability of electronic corpora and of a renewed interest in contrastive approaches to morphological analysis. From the 1990s onwards, morphological studies have increasingly relied on corpus data. An initial point of interest was the domain of productivity measurement (see Baayen & Lieber 1991, Baayen & Renouf 1996), but resorting to corpora soon became a widespread practice, notably to document rare phenomena, which cannot be thoroughly discussed in the absence of a wealth of data (see Plénat et al. 2002).
Introduction
Word-formation is the branch of linguistics that studies the nature and circumstances surrounding the coining of new complex lexemes. This field of research has been a source of fascination to scholars for centuries – descriptions regarding the mechanisms of lexical innovation of Classical Sanskrit existed already in the 4th century BCE. A number of controversial issues have traditionally underlain the discipline and, despite the efforts directed at solving them, many remain a matter of debate to the present day. As happened in other areas of linguistics, the 20th century witnessed a revolution in word-formation, thanks to Saussure’s writings and to monographs like Chomsky (1957), Dokulil (…
Coordinate compounding in English and Spanish
Coordinate compounding is a process which has been only sporadically considered in wordformation studies on Germanic and Romance languages. In this paper, we compare the situation in English with that in Spanish as far as formal structure and semantics are concerned. To this end, an operational definition of coordinate compounding is first provided, after which a semantic classification of coordinate compounds is developed. For each type, variants are discussed, representative examples are provided, and similarities and dissimilarities between the two languages are highlighted. We finish by raising the issues of recursiveness and productivity in coordinate compounding and we examine the pos…