Word formation, like other lexical phenomena, seems to be a difficult terrain for contrastive linguistics since it hardly allows for significant and insightful generalizations about the differences between two languages, as has been stated in the literature more than once. This paper investigates one factor leading to morphological differences and contrasts between historically related languages (Dutch and German). It is argued that word formation processes often show semantic fragmentation: in the course of time they develop 'semantic niches' , i.e. groups of words (subsets of a morphological category) kept together by formal and semantic criteria and extendable via analogy. When looking at word formation from a contrastive point of view, these niches seem to allow for better generalizations in terms of systematic correspondences and differences between two languages than the category as a whole. As a consequence, productivity should not be seen as an absolute notion, but rather as a local and gradual phenomenon. Morphology should not only account for the possibility of coining new words but also for their probability, because language comparison shows that even allegedly equivalent word formation processes often differ with respect to the probability of their use. The paper therefore argues in favour of an analogy approach that takes the existence of semantic niches seriously.

This paper presents a method of automatic construction extraction from a large corpus of Russian. The term 'construction' here means a multi-word expression in which a variable can be replaced with another word from the same semantic class, for example, a glass of [water/juice/milk]. We deal with constructions that consist of a noun and its adjective modifier. We propose a method of grouping such constructions into semantic classes via 2-step clustering of word vectors in distributional models. We compare it with other clustering techniques and evaluate it against A Russian-English Collocational Dictionary of the Human Body that contains manually annotated groups of constructions with nouns denoting human body parts. The best performing method is used to cluster all adjective-noun bigrams in the Russian National Corpus. Results of this procedure are publicly available and can be used to build a Russian construction dictionary, accelerate theoretical studies of constructions as well as facilitate teaching Russian as a foreign language.

This article argues that the rise of new derivational affixes can be analyzed adequately as a case of "constructionalization" within the framework of Construction Morphology as developed by Booij (2010). It reviews some aspects and problems of previous accounts that view the emergence of derivational affixes as a case of grammaticalization or as a case of lexicalization, respectively. In line with recent developments in grammaticalization research, not the isolated element (word or affix) is viewed as the locus of change, but the complex word as a whole -seen as a "construction" in the sense of Construction Grammar -and its relation with other constructions. Morphological change can be conceived as constructional change at the word level. We want to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editors for their valuable comments and suggestions.

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