The Semantics of Derivational Morphology

Bücher

Angebote / Angebote:

This book presents a synchronic and diachronicinvestigation of two derivational English affixes. Thesuffixes -age and -ery are analysed on the basis ofdictionary and corpus data and an adapted semanticmap method is introduced as a new way of accountingfor the semantic structure of derivatives. Thisstudy shows that the semantic structure of morphologicalcategories can change signi ficantly over time, and that semantic maps can represent this change ina straightforward manner. The semantic maps visualisethe relations and interdependencies of the readingsexpressed by derivatives, which leads to a newunderstanding of the semantic complexity of thesecategories.