View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Institutional Repository of the Freie Universität Berlin Hans-Heinrich Lieb Towards a general theory of word formation: the Process Model Foreword The present essay—longer than a paper but shorter than a book—characterizes the Process Model of Word Formation that represents a new approach to word formation intermediate between constructionist and generative approaches; the model will be elaborated in detail in: Lieb, Hans-Heinrich (in prep.), The Process Model of Word Formation and Inflection . Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. The essay, which is independent of the book, re- places an earlier, unpublished manuscript (Lieb 2011/2012), of which it is a completely revised and enlarged version. The essay was completed in July 2013; it is an outcome of work undertaken by the author since roughly 2006 but originating from still earlier work (first presented at a Research Colloquium held at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2001, and subsequently by a lecture read at the Annual Meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft in 2006: Lieb 2006). The present text is an Open Access publication by the Freie Universität Berlin; it is free for downloading, but all rights remain with the author (in particular, revamping of the text or its commercial use are prohibited; quotation only with indication of the source). The Freie Universität Berlin also houses a major effort at producing book-length Open Access publications in linguistics, organized into series: Language Science Press, langsci- press.org. The present essay does not fit this framework, both for lack of a suitable series and for being shorter than a book. An Open Access format was chosen for the essay by its author for a number of reasons, most importantly, to provoke discussion (contact the au- thor via: [email protected]). Please quote this essay as follows, together with its url: Lieb, Hans-Heinrich. 2013. Towards a general theory of word formation: the Process Model . Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin. (An Open Access publication.) The author is Full Professor (em.) of General and German Linguistics at the Freie Univer- sität Berlin in Berlin, Germany. Berlin, July 2013 Hans-Heinrich Lieb Contents A. Introduction and background 1 Introduction ................................................................................................................7 1.1 Aim, method, and theoretical background........................................................7 1.2 Word formation: the approach........................................................................10 1.3 Historical remarks...........................................................................................12 1.4 Word-formation statements: example and conventions..................................15 1.5 Word-formation statements: generalization....................................................16 2 Background: the WLP model...................................................................................18 2.1 Words, lexemes, paradigms............................................................................18 2.2 Paradigm forms...............................................................................................22 2.3 Lexical meanings ............................................................................................23 2.4 Paradigm bases: some essentials.....................................................................26 2.5 Paradigm bases and kinds of forms ................................................................29 2.6 Fully specified units........................................................................................30 B. The conception 3 Stem-form and word-form compounding in S: examples........................................33 3.1 dóor 1 lock 2: Introduction. The result and its basis ..........................................33 3.2 dóor 1 lock 2: shortening, form change, and arrangement.................................35 3.3 dóor 1 lock 2: category change ..........................................................................39 3.4 dóor 1 lock 2: meaning change. Summary.........................................................41 3.5 Word-form compounding (syntactic compounding) in S: lòck 1 óut 2..............44 3.6 Dealing with copulative compounding in S....................................................46 4 Other processes.........................................................................................................51 4.1 Stem-form derivation in S (st-der S): un 1 lóck 2 ................................................51 4.2 Word-form derivation (syntactic derivation) in S (wf-der S): lòck 1 úp 2 ..........52 4.3 Stem-form conversion in S (st-conv S): from lock to locking .........................55 4.4 Word-form conversion (syntactic conversion) in S: from locking-out to locking-out from work-place ..........................................................................57 4.5 The range of conversion functions..................................................................59 5 The basic processes in S: defining properties ..........................................................62 5.1 Role of the added triple. The process cline.....................................................62 5.2 The compounding process in S: the requirement of a non-empty added concept ............................................................................................................62 5.3 The derivation process in S: the requirement of an empty added concept .....66 5.4 The conversion process in S: going beyond strict conversion........................67 C. The Process Model of Word Formation 6 An outline of the Model ...........................................................................................71 6.1 General aspects ...............................................................................................71 6.2 Word-formation processes in S.......................................................................74 6.3 The compounding process, derivation process, and conversion process........77 6 Contents 6.4 Interrelating word-formation processes..........................................................80 6.5 Completing the Process Model.......................................................................81 7 Using the Process Model in word-formation description.........................................87 7.1 Introduction.....................................................................................................87 7.2 Process identification......................................................................................87 7.3 Word-formation rules......................................................................................89 8 Alternatives: remarks on a daughter model..............................................................91 8.1 Introduction.....................................................................................................91 8.2 Change 1: anchoring word-formation processes in S differently ...................91 8.3 Change 2: using different ‘basic objects’........................................................92 8.4 Change 3: introducing n-place word-formation processes .............................94 8.5 Change 4: reconceiving the arguments of word-formation processes............94 8.6 Change 5: using different functions that manipulate forms, generally and for conversion .................................................................................................95 References .......................................................................................................................97 A. Introduction and background 1 Introduction 1.1 Aim, method, and theoretical background 1.1 a. Aim Where does word formation belong? Does it really belong in morphology? Exactly what is being formed in word formation? Is word formation stem formation? Is the formation of lexical idioms—with many-word forms—word formation? Is word formation to be con- strued in terms of processes, or process results? How are different kinds of word formation to be defined? What exactly is it that is shared by different kinds of word formation, such as compounding, derivation, and conversion? What exactly is the difference between word formation and inflection, and what do they have in common? What is it that makes one kind of word formation, such as compounding, the same kind in different languages? How do we arrive at a consistent, disambiguated terminology for dealing with word formation? What is an appropriate format for word-formation statements? There continues to be considerable disagreement on these questions, and no current approach appears to have answers to all of them. It is the aim of the present essay to char- acterize a conception of word formation and a theory—meant to be adequate for all forma- tion types—that would allow us to answer the questions in a unified way. The theory is to be called the Process Model of Word Formation . The conception and the theory have four basic aspects: (i) they allow for a clear distinction to be drawn between what is morphological and what is syntactic in word formation; (ii) they assume that only three basic processes are involved in word formation: com- pounding, derivation, and conversion, each of them morphosyntactic because of its two major subcases: a morphological process resulting in stem forms, and a syn- tactic process resulting in word forms; (iii)