Young children often lack words for what they want to talk about. To fill the gaps in their lexicon, they coin new words. They rely on compounding and derivation to do this. This means identifying and analyzing parts of words – roots or stems, and affixes – and learning their meanings, as well as which combinations are possible. Some languages favor compounding and some derivation in word formation. Children are sensitive to which options are the most productive and adopt those first. Two-year-olds offer analyses of word meanings, as in running-stick (I run with it) or high-chair (it is high), and provide analyses of novel compounds where they take account of language structure (head noun first in Hebrew, second in English). They also analyze derived forms with agentive endings. They start to produce novel words from as young as age two, whether compounds in Germanic languages, or derived forms in Romance and Semitic. They begin with simple forms (minimal or no change to the root), advance to compound or derived word forms that are transparent in meaning, and opt for the most productive options in the adult language, with the goal of finding the right words to convey the child-speaker’s meaning.

This chapter aims to build an understanding of the differences between words and characters in Chinese by introducing the ways that words and Chinese characters are formed. Particular attention is paid to learning and writing Chinese characters.

A multivariate Poisson distribution is a natural choice for modeling count data stemming from correlated random variables; however, it is limited by the underlying univariate model assumption that the data are equi-dispersed. Alternative models include a multivariate negative binomial and a multivariate generalized Poisson distribution, which themselves suffer from analogous limitations as described in Chapter 1. While the aforementioned distributions motivate the need to instead consider a multivariate analog of the univariate COM–Poisson, such model development varies in order to take into account (or results in) certain distributional qualities. This chapter summarizes such efforts where, for each approach, readers will first learn about any bivariate COM–Poisson distribution formulations, followed by any multivariate analogs. Accordingly, because these models are multidimensional generalizations of the univariate COM–Poisson, they each contain their analogous forms of the Poisson, Bernoulli, and geometric distributions as special cases. The methods discussed in this chapter are the trivariate reduction, compounding, Sarmanov family of distributions, and copulas.

Chapter 4 investigates modern English neoclassical CFs. It explores fifteen initial and four final CFs, showing their type/token frequency and hapaxes in COCA and NOW, and their diachronic evolution in the GBC.

The book ends with the conclusions that the three categories of CFs analysed range on a continuum from compound-like to affix-like, and consist of an open class of elements destined to expand, to include novel splinters and form new words.

Chapter 14 examines several sets of person-denoting nominals that show interesting patterns in terms of how they participate in compounding and how they take arguments and modifiers in the syntax. Using a few key exemplar nominals such as ‘writer’, ‘author’, and ‘passenger’, the chapter argues that the different structures in which the nominals appear relate to whether the denotation of a given use of the nominal is fundamentally dispositional, relating to a long-term property, or fundamentally episodic, relating to a particular event or situation. It illustrates several morphological and syntactic differences which it then accounts for in terms of these semantic properties. The last part of the chapter examines NP-internal syntax and develops an account for structures involving modifiers which are marked with genitive case, and those which lack genitive marking.

Modifiers come in a wide range of semantic types. The prototypical modifiers, property concepts, sort the referents of the noun category into subcategories. Numerals, quantifiers, set-member modifiers (‘next,’ ‘last,’ ordinals), and mensural terms function to select an individual, a set of individuals, or an amount of a nonindividuated object. Nominal modifiers use another referent to situate the head referent, most commonly via relations of possession or location. Modification constructions use a variety of strategies to express the modifier--head referent relation, strategies that are used in many other relations within a construction. Simple strategies do not use any other morphemes to encode the relation, and include juxtaposition and compounding. Relational strategies encode the semantic relation between modifier and referent (more generally, dependent and head), and include adpositions and case affixes. Indexical strategies index a referent, either the head referent or the nominal dependent referent, and include most classifiers. The sources of these strategies are constructions with pronouns, nouns, or verbs; and the strategies may evolve into a linker.

This chapter highlights how phenomena found in modern Romance varieties as well as processes of language change pose challenges to the idea that inflexion, derivation, and compounding may reside in distinct modules or components of the grammar. It discusses the basic and uncontroversial characteristics of inflexion, derivation, and compounding with data from Romance languages and presents specific topics and case studies that challenge the traditional view from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. The first case study considers the ways in which various morphophonological alternations, such as diphthongization and palatalization, pattern alike or differently with respect to inflexion, derivation, and compounding. The question whether inflexion and derivation can be distinguished on semantic grounds is the focus of two further case studies dealing with (i) the formal marking and the semantic interpretation of number in Italian ambigeneric nouns, and (ii) with the different outcomes of the Latin augment /-sc-/ in modern Romance languages, which evolved in some languages into an inflexional marker, while retaining a derivational function in others. A final topic covered is so-called ‘conversion’, defined here as a transpositional (i.e., category-changing) process that is not marked by any formative, and thus applies to fully inflected words.

This chapter begins with the basics of affixation, including the types of morphemes that are commonly found in English (prefixes, suffixes, bound bases, formatives, extenders). Students learn to formulate word formation rules, to represent the internal structure of complex words with tree structures, and to understand difficulties that arise in segmenting words. The chapter also considers the range of meanings that derivational affixes can express. It includes a section on compounding that considers the difficulties in defining what a compound is, the notion of headedness, and the types of compounds that are common in English. The chapter also briefly considers minor types of word formation such as backformation, blending, acronyms, initialisms, and coinage. Students are taught to use corpora such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English to find their own morphological data.

This chapter gives an introductory overview of the strategies for forming words in the languages of mainland Southeast Asia. The chapter begins with a discussion of the form class distinctions that are found, including the categories of noun, verb, adjective, adposition, and adverb. Of the various processes for forming words, the chapter focuses on compounding and reduplication, which are relied upon widely in languages of the area, and affixation, which is a speciality of Austroasiatic languages in particular. The chapter features a section on the uses of tone in word formation, a feature of Hmong-Mien languages. Psycho-collocations are discussed: an area-wide form of compounding involving the mention of body parts to denote emotional and psychological states.

As noted by Bauer, real dvandva compounds – that is, coordinative compounds that properly express the aggregation of two different entities, not the intersection of properties in one entity – are extremely rare in English and Spanish. This article explores the empirical domain of dvandva compounding in Spanish, and notes that they are productive when not used as heads within their phrases. We propose that the explanation for this is that Spanish can only productively build dvandva compounds using flat structures without internal hierarchy. This causes the compound to look externally for a head noun that defines the interpretation of the relation established between the two members of the dvandva. The proposal also explains why proper names are preferred in dvandva compounding, given that they do not denote properties.

This article investigates the presence of intermediate morphological categories between stems and affixes, the so-called affixoids (prefixoids and suffixoids) in a number of Modern Greek varieties. It argues that affixoids can exist as an independent morphological category in morphologically rich languages, such as Modern Greek, on the condition that these languages base their word-formation processes on stems. It also shows that affixoids can vary within the same language, depending on several factors, such as the original items the affixoids come from (Greek affixoids may emerge from lexemes or affixes), the word-formation process which gives birth to them, or the occurrence of a grammaticalization or a degrammaticalization process. Proposals and arguments are supported by evidence consisting of two prefixoids, plako- and mata-, and one suffixoid, -opulo, drawn from the Modern Greek varieties.

Word formation in Germanic languages mainly takes place by means of compounding and affixation. Compounds are usually right-headed, and there is often a linking element in N+N-compounds that derives historically from a case ending. In addition to endocentric compounds there are also copulative compounds. Compounding also takes place with roots of Greek and Latin origin that do not occur as words by themselves. Some compound constituents have developed into affixoids. Affixation is used to derive words of major categories: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Some of these affixes behave phonologically similar to compound constituents. Many nonnative affixes, identified on the basis of sets of borrowed nonnative complex words, are being used in word formation as well. Other mechanisms of word formation are affix substitution, conversion, reduplication, prosodic morphology, abbreviation, and blending. For the construction of numerals above 20, syntactic coordination may be used. The word formation patterns of Germanic languages have been strongly influenced by contact with Greek, Latin, and French. In addition, they have been influenced by contact with English. Individual languages have borrowed some of their morphology and complex words from another Germanic language, and Yiddish has been strongly influenced by various non-Germanic languages.

Chapter 5 describes word formation in Korean. We focus on three major aspects of Korean morphology: (1) morphological types and properties, (2) affixation, and (3) compounding. We introduce the approach of Korean grammarians in classifying major parts of speech. They distinguish Category 1 (Nominals: nouns, pronouns and numerals), Category 2 (Predicatives: verbs and adjectives, which can function in Korean as predicates on their own), and Category 3 (Modifiers: determiners, adnominals, adverbials, and particles). We go on to examine bound morphemes, including the bound stems in Category 2, particles in Category 3, and dependent nouns. We also discuss affixation and compounding processes, distinguishing derivational and inflectional affixation and surveying co-compounding/sub-compounding.