27.2877, Review: Morphology; Semantics; Typology: Hernández, Štekauer, Kőrtvélyessy (2015)

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Subject: 27.2877, Review: Morphology; Semantics; Typology: Hernández, Štekauer, Kőrtvélyessy (2015)

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Date: Wed, 06 Jul 2016 12:24:19
From: Laura Anna Ciaccio [laura.ciaccio at uni-potsdam.de]
Subject: Word-Formation in the World's Languages

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-3469.html

AUTHOR: Pavol  Štekauer
AUTHOR: Salvador Valera  Hernández
AUTHOR: Lívia  Kőrtvélyessy
TITLE: Word-Formation in the World's Languages
SUBTITLE: A Typological Survey
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Laura Anna Ciaccio, Universität Potsdam

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

Word-Formation in the World’s Languages. A Typological Survey provides a
complete overview of word-formation phenomena in a large sample of different
languages, pointing to some problems related to their categorization. The book
starts with an introduction, followed by two sections; the former presents the
field of word-formation, while the latter provides a cross-linguistic analysis
of the different word-formation strategies. In the present review, each
chapter will be briefly presented, followed by an evaluation of the work. For
reasons of space, only the most significant of the many aspects discussed in
the handbook will be covered.

In the introduction, the authors state that their goal is providing a
description of the typological differences in the field of word-formation.
Some relevant points are discussed: first, the authors emphasize that most
typological literature has focused on inflection, and that much less has been
done on derivation; second, they also claim that, although some authors (e.g.
Bauer 2000) have questioned the distinction between inflectional and
derivational morphology, they still believe it is meaningful to differentiate
them, although boundaries are very blurred; finally, they remind readers that
sampling for typological research always implies a certain degree of
compromise between the resources available for research and a minimum standard
of quality. For the present research, data were mainly collected by means of
questionnaires filled out by experts and, when available, from the grammars of
the individual languages. The languages included in the study are fifty-five,
representative of twenty-eight language families and forty-five genera. The
fifty-five languages are spread over all continents and were analyzed for
around seventy word-formation parameters. 

Part I ‘The field of word-formation’ includes two chapters, ‘The scope of
word-formation’ and ‘Word-formation vs syntax’.

Chapter I ‘The scope of word-formation’ deals with the problem of clearly
defining the boundaries of word-formation, specifically addressing the
distinction between inflection and derivation. Citing Haspelmath (1996), the
authors claim that it would be impossible to draw a neat distinction between
these two categories, which should rather be thought of as two extremes of a
continuum. One example of a borderline case are evaluative affixes, which are
generally thought of as derivational but can also be, as in many African
languages, inflectional. Aspect and plurality affixes are other problematic
cases.

Chapter II ‘Word-formation vs syntax’ addresses those word-formation processes
involving free morphemes (compounding, noun incorporation, reduplication), for
which it is sometimes hard to draw a line between word-formation and syntax.
The authors first delineate the problem of a unique definition of what is a
‘word’, emphasizing that this is another fuzzy concept, covering a range of
different phenomena. For example, if we assume that the feature of being
listed in the mental lexicon (‘listedness’) is a requirement for the
definition of word, this would exclude many compounds and complex words,
especially in the case of very productive phenomena, which do not seem to be
listed in the mental lexicon as whole chunks. The status of compounds is
especially difficult, since some units may be compounds in some languages and
have syntactic nature in others. Noun incorporation is even more challenging;
this is a verb-forming process where a verbal stem incorporates a nominal
stem, which acts as an argument of the verb within the new derived word. This
process seems partly to be governed by syntactic, partly by word-formation
rules.

Part II of the handbook includes a cross-linguistic analysis of all
word-formation processes. The authors provide a full description of all
phenomena, providing details about both their formal and semantic
characteristics. For each process, they also report information about the
languages of their sample, i.e. in which languages the process was found,
together with some meaningful examples. These often try to shed light on the
phenomenon, especially in the most controversial cases. 

Chapter III ‘Word-formation processes combining free morphemes’ focuses on
compounding, reduplication, and blending. The authors decide to only discuss
the most widespread types of compounds. Among these, particularly interesting
are compound verbs, whose status is rather controversial in some languages.
These compounds are discussed by some morphologists in other terms rather than
compounding, e.g. back-formation, zero-derivation, or noun incorporation. Noun
incorporation is also addressed by the authors, who report having observed
this phenomenon in almost forty percent of their sample and with different
functions associated to the incorporated noun. The authors also discuss the
status of the exocentric compounds; based on the distinction between
determinatum and determinant, exocentric compounds are to be distinguished
from endocentric compounds because their determinatus lies outside of the
compound. Such compounds are to be found in many of the languages under
examination and are particularly interesting because of the debate on whether
they originate in the same way as endocentric compounds or not. Furthermore,
coordinative compounds, i.e. those with double-head structure and no modifier,
were also found in the sample. In spite of the lack of the head, the authors
underline the fact that the order of the constituents is rather fixed and
lexicalized, which makes it clear that the so-called dvandva compounds, with
theoretically free order, are not the rule but rather a sub-category. The
recursiveness of word-formation also applies to compounding, although it is
more frequent in some languages than in others. 

Reduplication was found in eighty percent of the languages of the study. This
phenomenon involves the repetition of a part of a word, where the repeated
part takes a particular form based on phonological conditions. An example is
the English word helter-skelter. This phenomenon is particularly interesting
since it has been less described in the domain of the Indo-European languages,
sometimes being categorized within other existing categories. The authors
underline that reduplication can take several forms, which is also why there
is no agreement on how to discuss it. The claim they share is that we have to
distinguish between affix-like and compound-like reduplication. Remarkably,
reduplication can also be applied to inflection. 

Blending is the last phenomenon dealt with in the Chapter III. This is
particularly productive in Indo-European languages, and was also found in the
study sample. The authors claim that blending is merely a compound which gets
successively reduced because of stylistic reasons, losing its transparency.
The fact that it is especially widespread in the languages where compounding
is also very productive seems to support this claim.

Chapter IV ´Word-formation processes with bound morphemes´ discusses those
complex words formed by means of a derivational affix. The authors emphasize
that the presence of affixation varies dramatically across languages, from
cases where this is totally absent to those where a language makes use of
hundreds of different affixes. A problem concerning affixation from a
typological perspective is the variety of different phenomena that this terms
includes. There are cases where affixes correspond to actual words (like
prepositions or adverbs), thus making it hard to distinguish them from
compound constituents, or other cases where it is possible to observe a
diachronic shift from compound constituent to bound morpheme, productively
used as affix (like the English -less). Another problem is the boundary
between derivational and inflectional affixes, which becomes even more
problematic for those languages that productively use conversion (e.g. the
German verb lesen, to read, can be converted into a noun without any change,
and this phenomenon is very productive in German). The authors then discuss
the phenomena of suffixation and prefixation. Suffixation was found in all
languages of the sample but two, while prefixation was much less widespread;
this also reflects findings that have been reported elsewhere (e.g. Sapir
1921:67). In this respect, it has been debated on whether the difference
between prefixes and suffixes goes beyond their position and would then
justify a separate treatment for these two categories, with prefixation being
more similar to compounding. The authors do not seem to agree with this claim,
rather highlighting what these two processes have in common. Recursiveness of
affixation is the next topic the authors focus on; many of the languages under
examination present this phenomenon, although this can take different forms
and undergo different rules. Another noteworthy issue related to affixation
concerns the different meanings that one affix may convey or, vice versa, the
case of different affixes conveying the same meaning. 

Chapter V ‘Word-formation without addition of derivational material and
subtractive word-formation’ describes those word-formation processes where
some meaning is added without adding any morpheme or even deleting morphemes.
The first phenomenon analyzed is conversion, which implies a change in the
word class with no other change in the form. The nature of conversion has
often been criticized, as it seems to describe very well Indo-European
languages, but not to apply to all languages. These are, for example,
languages that have bases that can be always used as different word classes
without being changed; in such cases, the difference between e.g. a verb and a
noun would be purely inflectional. The question is rather complex and raises
the more complicated issue of the universality of the word classes used to
describe Indo-European languages. Another controversial phenomenon is that of
back-formation. This involves creating a new word by deleting morphemes from
the base, and the direction is generally from nouns to verbs. As for the other
phenomena, the authors emphasize that the status of back-formation as an
independent word-formation process can be questionable.

Chapter VI ‘An onomasiological analysis’ presents a detailed overview on how
the most common semantic categories can be expressed by means of
word-formation. This is a very innovative chapter, since dealing with
word-formation from the point of view of its cognitive and semiotic aspects
represents a shift from the more widespread form-based paradigm characterizing
the first part of the book. Unfortunately, since there is no universally
accepted list of such semantic categories, the authors had to select them
based on Indo-European languages. The categories they included are: nominal,
evaluative, verbal, and word-class changing. For each category, they identify
sub-categories and report by means of which word-formation processes these are
realized in the sample under analysis. The nominal group includes the
following subcategories: agents, patients, instrumentals, locatives, and
gender in animate beings. As for the evaluative group, its subcategories are:
augmentative and diminutive. A peculiar feature of this category is that it is
not limited to a specific word class, but can be applied and can result in
several word classes. Moreover, while in most cases the word-class of the
original word remains unchanged, the authors point to some rare cases of
class-changing formations, happening e.g. in Japanese and Hausa. The verbal
category includes: causatives, transitivity and intransitivity (surprisingly,
these not only take verbs as stems), iterativity and/or intensification.
Finally, the word-class changing phenomena described are the formation of
action and abstract nouns.

The concluding chapter ‘Results and discussion’ presents the data analysis
performed on the sample and the authors’ interpretation of the results
obtained. The authors emphasize that the final aim of their work was not to
obtain predictions about the occurrence of word-formation phenomena in the
sample, but rather to provide an overview of such phenomena. Since an
extensive typological work on word-formation was still missing, this step was
needed before being able to derive predictions. Moreover, the data they found
do not lend themselves to formulating predictions. This may suggest, on the
one hand, that more data are needed, or, on the other, just that these
phenomena are not predictable. The authors describe their statistical
analyses. Results show that suffixation, compounding, reduplication, and
prefixation are the most widespread phenomena in their sample and occurred in
the sample more than expected. This is an interesting result, as reduplication
has hardly been described for Indo-European languages. Three families of the
sample resulted to be the most dissimilar from the rest: Afro-Asiatic,
Austro-Asiatic, and Indo-European languages. Even in the semantic approach,
suffixation is the most widespread word-formation process, and is used for all
the semantic categories that the authors identified in the previous chapter. 

EVALUATION

Word-Formation in the World’s Languages. A Typological Survey represents the
first attempt to provide a full typological handbook on word-formation. In
this respect, it differs from previous work, which has focused on single
word-formation processes, like infixation (Ultan 1975), noun incorporation
(Mithun 1984), or evaluative morphology (Bauer 1996 and 1997). Considering the
variety of phenomena analyzed and the examples presented, the authors surely
manage to reach their goal. The final product is similar in its scope to the
traditional handbooks on word-formation (see e.g. Aronoff 2011 or Fleischer
1971).

The handbook assumes some prior basic knowledge of morphology and
word-formation, e.g. of the status of morphemes and of the major
word-formation strategies. However, although the level of the content is very
high, the audience does not need to be highly familiar with the topic. This
mixture between high-level descriptions and understandability for a larger
audience is achieved by means of clear explanations of some less discussed
phenomena or issues (e.g. what is a word, the status of reduplication or
back-formation). Furthermore, the variety of examples is well selected and
manages to give a clear idea about the phenomenon under analysis. Importantly,
examples are also very well used to present problematic issues. 

Being the first comprehensive work of this kind, the handbook paves the way
for further typological research in the area of word-formation. Among the
others, some aspects are worth being specifically investigated. For example,
the semantic approach to word-formation is methodologically very attractive.
The authors probably only aimed at showing another possible and fruitful way
of describing word-formation and in raising some interest for this less
widespread method, and in these terms they certainly reach their goal.
However, the readers may then wish to have a more detailed section on this
approach, and this desire cannot be satisfied by the authors for clear reasons
of space. Therefore, some future research may aim at providing a more
extensive analytical description of word-formation processes from this
perspective. This would be beneficial not only for theoretical linguists, but
also for the cognitive approaches to language. An important aim of using this
approach would be establishing a list of universal semantic categories
expressed by word-formation. As Štekauer, Valera, and Körtvélyessy point out,
they decided to use the Indo-European semantic categories for their analysis,
which do not necessarily apply to all the world’s languages. This is a minor
shortcoming of their work, and it was probably the best option for their case,
but it needs to be specifically addressed in the near future.

As for the form-based section of the handbook, this represents a more
classical approach to word-formation, but still succeeds in being innovative,
especially because it sheds light on phenomena that are under-represented in
Indo-European languages and, for this reason, under-researched. This is the
case of e.g. noun-incorporation or reduplication. However, the authors often
avoid taking a strong position on such controversial issues, but rather limit
themselves to acknowledging them. Therefore, sometimes, it seems that a
conclusion based on the sample is missing, and that the advantage of going
beyond Indo-European languages is not fully exploited.

In conclusion, the monograph represents an important milestone for typological
research in word-formation, being at the same time a big achievement and a
starting point for future research.

REFERENCES

Aronoff, Marc, & Fudeman, Kirsten. 2011. What is morphology. John Wiley &
Sons.
Bauer, Laurie. 1996. No phonetic iconicity in evaluative morphology. Studia
linguistica, 50(2), 189-206.

Bauer, Laurie. 1997. Evaluative morphology: in search of universals. Studies
in Language, 21(3), 533-575.

Bauer, Laurie. 2002. What you can do with derivational morphology. Morphology
2000, 37-48.

Fleischer, Wolfgang. 1971. Wortbildung der deutschen Gegenwartssprache.
Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Haspelmath, Martin. 1996. Word-class-changing inflection and morphological
theory. In: Yearbook of Morphology 1995. Springer, pp. 43-66.

Mithun, Marianne. 1984. The evolution of noun incorporation. Language, 60,
847-894.
Sapir, Edward. 1921. Language: An introduction to the study of speech. New
York: Harcout, Brace & Company.

Ultan, Russell. 1975. Infixes and their origins. In Seiler, H. (ed.)
Linguistic workshop III. Münich: Wilhelm Fink, pp. 157-205.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Laura Anna Ciaccio is a Ph.D. student in the International Programme for
Experimental and Clinical Linguistics at the University of Potsdam. In her
project, she is investigating differences and similarities in the processing
of prefixed and suffixed words. Her research interests lie in the area of
derivational morphology, and her research methods include research with
aphasic and non-native speakers.





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