EAN: 9783484305274

LEXICAL SEMANTICS AND DIACHRONIC MORPHOLOGY - C...

This book is the most comprehensive study to date of the development of the three suffixes
-hood  -dom and -ship in the history of English. Based on data from annotated corpora it
provides an in depth investigation from Old English to Modern English and shows that
structurally the three suffixes developed from syntactic heads (nouns) via morphological heads
in compounds to morphological heads in derivations. Being an instance of morphologisation the
rise of suffixes clearly shows that word formation is not part of the syntactic module. This
development is triggered by semantic change  more precisely  by the semantics of the elements
which keep their salient meanings and develop further meanings through metonymic shifts 
finally leading to underspecified meanings. The findings are analysed in a revised version of
Lieber's (2004) framework to account for the diachronic facts and have far-reaching
consequences for morphological theory since they show that derivational suffixes bear meaning
and hence contribute to processes of lexicalisation which is clear evidence for sign-based
models and against  for example  Separationist assumptions.

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