This textbook provides an accessible introduction to the study of word-formation, that is, the ways in which new words are built on the bases of other words (e.g. happy - happy-ness), focusing on English. The book's didactic aim is to enable students with little or no prior linguistic knowledge to do their own practical analyses of complex words. Readers are familiarized with the necessary methodological tools to obtain and analyze relevant data and are shown how to relate their findings to theoretical problems and debates. The book is not written in the perspective of a particular theoretical framework and draws on insights from various research traditions, reflecting important methodological and theoretical developments in the field. It is a textbook directed towards university students of English at all levels. It can also serve as a source book for teachers and advanced students, and as an up-to-date reference concerning many word-formation processes in English.

Recent research has shown that homophonous lexemes show systematic phonetic differences (e.g. Gahl 2008, Drager 2011), with important consequences for models of speech production such as Levelt et al. (1999). These findings also pose the question of whether similar differences hold for allegedly homophonous affixes (instead of free lexemes). Earlier experimental research found some evidence that morphemic and non-morphemic sounds may differ acoustically (Walsh & Parker 1983, Losiewicz 1992). This paper investigates this question by analyzing the phonetic realization of non-morphemic /s/ and /z/, and of six different English /s/ and /z/ morphemes (plural, genitive, genitive-plural and 3rd person singular, as well as cliticized forms of has and is). The analysis is based on more than 600 tokens extracted from conversational speech (Buckeye Corpus, Pitt et al. 2007). Two important results emerge. First, there are significant differences in acoustic duration between some morphemic /s/’s and /z/’s and non-morphemic /s/ and /z/, respectively. Second, there are significant differences in duration between some of the morphemes. These findings challenge standard assumptions in morphological theory, lexical phonology and models of speech production.

ABSTRACT. There is a long-standing debate about the principles and mechanisms that constrain the combinatorial properties of affixes, in particular of English suffixes. One group of scholars argues for the existence of lexical strata with strong restrictions holding between the different strata. This view is disputed by scholars who claim that it is selectional restrictions of individual suffixes that are responsible for the combinatorial properties of suffixes. Most recently, Hay (2000 has proposed a psycholinguistic model of morphological complexity, according to which an affix which can be easily parsed out in processing should not occur inside an affix which cannot. This model has been called "complexity based ordering". The general claim is that affixes can be approximately ordered along a hierarchy of complexity, with more separable affixes at one end, and less separable affixes at the other end. More separable affixes can attach outside less separable affixes, but not vice-versa. The goal of this paper is to test the predictions of complexity based ordering through an investigation of 15 English suffixes and their potential 210 two suffix combinations. Using large data-bases such as the British National Corpus, the CELEX lexical data-base, the OED and the internet, we investigate whether the attested and non-attested combinations are best explained by complexity based ordering or by the individual selectional properties of these suffixes. We show that in most INTRODUCTION 1In English (and presumably in all other languages with derivational morphology), there are severe restrictions on possible combinations of affixes and bases. A given derivational affix attaches only to bases that have certain phonological, morphological, semantic, or syntactic properties. For example, the verbal suffix -ize only occurs on nouns and adjectives that end in an unstressed syllable (see Plag 1999 for details). Similar, or even more complex, restrictions seem to hold for affix-affix combinations. For instance, the word atomic can take the suffix -ity as a nominalizing suffix, whereas the word atomless can not take -ity, but can take the competing nominalizing suffix -ness (*atomlessity vs. atomlessness).There has been a long debate about whether there are general principles or mechanisms that constrain the combinatorial properties of affixes, but no consensus has yet been reached. There are basically three approaches to the problem. First, there are stratum-oriented models (e.g. Siegel 1974, Allen 1978, Selkirk 1982, Kiparsky 1982, Mohanan 1986, Giegerich 1999) that claim that the lexicon has a layered structure and that this structure largely determines the combinatorial properties of affixes. Second, there are scholars who argue that affix-particular selectional restrictions (of a phonological, morphological, semantic or syntactic nature) are responsible for possible and impossible combinations of affixes (e.g. Fabb 1988, Plag 1999. Most recently, a third theory has been proposed in Hay (2000Hay ( , 2002, which says that c...

Recent research on the acoustic realization of affixes has revealed differences between phonologically homophonous affixes, e.g. the different kinds of final [s] and [z] in English (Plag, Homann & Kunter 2017, Zimmermann 2016a). Such results are unexpected and unaccounted for in widely accepted post-Bloomfieldian item-and-arrangement models (Hockett 1954), which separate lexical and post-lexical phonology, and in models which interpret phonetic effects as consequences of different prosodic structure. This paper demonstrates that the differences in duration of English final S as a function of the morphological function it expresses (non-morphemic, plural, third person singular, genitive, genitive plural, cliticizedhas, and cliticizedis) can be approximated by considering the support for these morphological functions from the words’ sublexical and collocational properties. We estimated this support using naïve discriminative learning and replicated previous results for English vowels (Tucker, Sims & Baayen 2019), indicating that segment duration is lengthened under higher functional certainty but shortened under functional uncertainty. We discuss the implications of these results, obtained with a wide learning network that eschews representations for morphemes and exponents, for models in theoretical morphology as well as for models of lexical processing.