New Benjamins title - M ühleisen: Heterogeneity in Word-Formation Patterns

[Paul Peranteau]

Heterogeneity in Word-Formation Patterns
A corpus-based analysis of suffixation with -ee and its productivity in English
Susanne Mühleisen
University of Bayreuth

Studies in Language Companion Series 118

2010. xiii, 245 pp.

Hardbound  978 90 272 0585 8 / EUR 95.00 / USD 143.00
e-Book – Not yet available  978 90 272 8838 7 / EUR 95.00 / USD 143.00

Postulated word-formation rules often exclude formations that can 
nevertheless be found in actual usage. This book presents an in-depth 
investigation of a highly heterogeneous word-formation pattern in 
English: the formation of nouns by suffixation with -ee. Rather than 
relying on a single semantic or syntactic framework for analysis, the 
study combines diachronic, cognitive and language-contact 
perspectives in order to explain the diversity in the formation and 
establishment of -ee words. It also seeks to challenge previous 
measurements of productivity and proposes a new way to investigate 
the relationship between actual and possible words. By making use of 
the largest and most up-to-date electronic corpus – the World Wide 
Web – as a data source, this research adds substantially to the 
number of attested -ee words. It furthermore analyses this 
word-formation pattern in different varieties of English (British vs. 
American English; Australian English). Due to the multiplicity of 
approaches and analyses it offers, the study is suitable for courses 
in English word-formation, lexicology, corpus linguistics and 
historical linguistics.

Table of contents

Acknowledgments  ix
List of tables and figures  xi–xii
List of abbreviations  xiii
Chapter 1. Introduction: Polysemy, heterogeneity and ambiguity in 
word-formation patterns  1–18
Chapter 2. Phonological, syntactic and semantic constraints on the 
formation of -ee words  19–60
Chapter 3. The career of -ee words: A diachronic analysis from 
medieval legal use to nineteenth-century ironic nonce words  61–90
Chapter 4. Morphology and the lexicon: On creativity and productivity 
of -ee words  91–119
Chapter 5. A corpus-based analysis of 1,000 potential new -ee words  121–164
Chapter 6. -ee words in varieties of English  165–187
Conclusion. On the study of an individual word-formation pattern: 
General and particular implications  189–192
Works cited  193–199
Appendix 1. Documentation of established -ee words with their 
citation sources: A comparison (in alphabetical order)  201–213
Appendix 2. Quantitative analysis of 1,000 potential -ee words 
(Web-search, February–June 2005)  215–239
Name index  241–242
Subject index  243–245




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