The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology

The first comprehensive description of English word formation covers inflection and derivation, compounding, conversion, and minor processes such as subtractive morphology. It combines theory-neutral presentation of data with theoretically informed analysis. Winner of the 2015 Bloomfield Book Award and written by three outstanding scholars.

This volume presents a data-rich description of English inflection and word-formation. Based on large corpora including the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British national Corpus, it is the first comprehensive treatment of contemporary English morphology that includes both inflection and word-formation. It covers not only well-studied topics such as compounding, conversion, and the inflection and derivation of nouns and verbs, but also areas that have received less scholarly attention, such as the formation of adjectives, locatives, negatives, evaluatives, neoclassical compounds and blends, among many other topics. Equal wieght is given to form and meaning. The volume also contains sections devoted to phonological and orthographics aspects of morphology and to combinatorial and paradigmatic properties of English morphology. It ends with a series of chapters that assess the implications of English morphology for morphological theory, discussing topics such as stratification, blocking and comprtition, the analysis of conversion, and the relationship between inflection and derivation.Winner of the 2015 Bloomfield Book Award and written by three outstanding scholars, this outstanding book will interest all scholars and students of English and of linguistic morphology more generally.