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. An in depth investigation from Old English to Modern English based on data from annotated corpora reveals that all three suffixes developed from nouns into today's suffixes building abstract nouns. It is shown that the rise of suffixes is triggered by semantic change. The findings are analysed in a current model of lexical semantics of word formation (Lieber 2004). The book includes an index with all formations with the three suffixes from Old English to Modern English.

The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology is intended as a companion volume to the Oxford Handbook of Compounding (OUP 2009), aiming to provide a comprehensive and thorough overview of the study of derivational morphology. Written by distinguished scholars, its 41 chapters are devoted to theoretical and definitional matters, formal and semantic issues, interdisciplinary connections, and detailed descriptions of derivational processes in a wide range of language families. It presents the reader with the current state of the art in the study of derivational morphology. The handbook begins with an overview and a consideration of definitional matters, distinguishing derivation from inflection on the one hand and compounding on the other. From a formal perspective, the handbook treats affixation (prefixation, suffixation, infixation, circumfixation, etc.), conversion, reduplication, root and pattern and other templatic processes, as well as prosodic and subtractive means of forming new words. From a semantic perspective, it looks at the processes that form various types of adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and verbs, as well as evaluatives and the rarer processes that form function words. Chapters are devoted to issues of theory, methodology, the historical development of derivation, and to child language acquisition, sociolinguistic, experimental, and psycholinguistic approaches. The second half of the book surveys derivation in fifteen language families that are widely dispersed in terms of both geographical location and typological characteristics. It ends with a consideration of both areal tendencies in derivation and the issue of universals.

In the study of word formation, the focus has often been on generating the form. In this book, the semantic aspect of the formation of new words is central. It is viewed from the perspectives of word formation rules and of lexicalization. An extensive introduction gives a historical overview of the study of the semantics of word formation and lexicalization, explaining how the different theoretical frameworks used in the contributions relate to each other. Each chapter then concentrates on a specific question about a theoretical concept or a word formation process in a particular language and adopts a theoretical framework that is appropriate to the study of this question. From general theoretical concepts of productivity and lexicalization, the focus moves to terminology, compounding, and derivation. Theoretical frameworks discussed include Jackendoff's Conceptual Structure, Langacker's Cognitive Grammar, Lieber's lexical semantic approach to word formation, Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon, Beard's Lexeme-Morpheme-Base Morphology, The onomasiological approach to terminology and word formation.

This volume focuses on a number of interrelated issues in the theorizing and interpretation of morphological rivalry, including the differences between a semasiological and an onomasiological approach to competition phenomena in word-formation, the scope of such phenomena (micro-level rivalry between individual affixes, as well as macro-level competition between different processes), the different sources of competition, and the possible resolutions of competitive situations. An overview of existing research in the field is provided, as well as new, cutting-edge findings and proposals for analytical innovation. Linguistic data are drawn from European and Asian languages, and morphologists, semanticists, and anyone interested in the dynamics of language will be stimulated by the analytical models and explanations offered in the 11 chapters.

Rather than an attempt at an exhaustive bibliography of morphology, this is a collection of major and selected minor works of theoretical interest in the broadest sense. The area of morphology represented here exhaustively is contemporary (generative) theoretical morphology, interpreted broadly enough to include theoretically interesting structuralist works, works aimed at explaining deep motivations of morphology or pertinent to contemporary theoretical morphology. Selected descriptive works have been included as well; it is not at all simple to draw a line between descriptive works of theoretical interest and fundamentally theoretical works, and in addition we hope to provide entry points into a variety languages for morphologists seeking language-specific evidence for general hypotheses.

The author strikes a balance between theoretical exploration and diachronic description, supporting each step in the argumentation with detailed case studies which chart the semantic development of particular words, or illustrate specific mechanisms of semantic change. Thus the book provides both a theoretical model for diachronic semantics and a number of methodological strategies and representational formats that exemplify how changes of word meaning can be studied in practice.

The present study is the first to apply a syntactic approach to the grammaticalization of Chinese modals, based on hypotheses on cross-linguistic diachronic developments of modals from lexical to functional categories as upward movement on a functional spine. The temporal framework of the study covers Late Archaic and Middle Chinese. Early Middle Chinese is a crucial turning point for the development of Chinese from a more synthetic to a more analytic language. This change is attributed e.g. to the loss of a former morphology, which also affects the modal system. Against this background, the negative cycle of Chinese, the relevance of polarity contexts, and the development of a new system of deontic, epistemic and future markers are analyzed. In addition to a comprehensive analysis of the syntactic processes involved in the diachronic changes of the Chinese modal system, the study also provides a comparison with the syntax of grammaticalization of the thoroughly discussed Germanic modals. This constitutes a broad basis for further analyses of the changes in the Chinese language during its long written history, but also for cross-linguistic studies on the syntax of grammaticalization and on linguistic universals.

The contents of the present volume will enhance our understanding of the diachrony of agreement systems and provide a useful starting point for future studies on this both fascinating and intricate field of research.