The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Part 69. In the past decade, Cognitive Linguistics has developed into one of the most dynamic and attractive frameworks within theoretical and descriptive linguistics The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics is a major new reference that presents a comprehensive overview of the main theoretical concepts and descriptive/theoretical models of Cognitive Linguistics, and covers its various subfields, theoretical as well as applied. | CHAPTER 25 WORD-FORMATION FRIEDRICH UNGERER 1. Introduction Word-formation is one of those linguistic terms that may be unsatisfactory on a more theoretical level but that are immensely useful when one tries to survey processes of extending the lexicon. Loosely defined as creating new words from existing words 1 word-formation ranges from prefixation and suffixation where it overlaps with inflectional morphology in the use of bound morphemes see Janda this volume chapter 24 to processes not even reflected in the phonological form of the item involved . conversion there word-formation borders on purely semantic processes of metaphor and metonymy Lipka 2002 108-9 . Between these two extremes maybe placed the many ways in which words can be combined fused and condensed as in compounds lexical blends back-formations clippings and acronyms . Since English is one of the languages that makes use of all these processes mostly English examples will be chosen for illustrative purposes but it should be kept in mind that some of the processes in particular affixation are much more widespread and more differentiated in other languages. However the relative sparseness of affixal processes in English has not kept structuralist linguistics from approaching English word-formation within the framework of a morphological analysis focused on the segmentation of free and bound morphemes with the emphasis on the latter adding zero forms to include conversion dirty adj. dirty verb back-derivation baby-sitt er n. 0 baby-sit verb and bahuvrihi compounds laptop 0 laptop computer and only grudgingly admitting that blends acronyms and other irregular forms did not really lend themselves to this kind of interpretation. The relationship between WORD-FORMATION 651 the constituent elements of word-formation items . the items that result from word-formation processes was first interpreted as a hierarchy of immediate constituents based on a modifier-head relationship later underlying .
