The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology

This volume presents a data-rich description of English inflection and word-formation. Based on large corpora including the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus, it provides a comprehensive treatment of contemporary English morphology that includes both inflection and word-formation. It covers not only well-studied topics such as compounding, conversion, and the inflection and derivation of nouns and verbs, but also areas that have received less scholarly attention, such as the formation of adjectives, locatives, negatives, evaluatives, neoclassical compounds and blends, among many other topics. Equal weight is given to form and meaning. The volume also contains sections devoted to phonological and orthographic aspects of morphology and to combinatorial and paradigmatic properties of English morphology. It ends with a series of chapters that assess the implications of English morphology for morphological theory, discussing topics such as stratification, blocking, and competition, the analysis of conversion, and the relationship between inflection and derivation.