Reviewed by Anish Koshy, The English and Foreign Languages University, India

The contributions in the volume are selected papers from the Second International Cognitive Linguistics Conference held in Munich in 2006 and invited papers. The book is organized into two parts.

Part 1, ‘Theory and interfaces in word formation’, deals with theoretical contributions, interface issues, and classification of Word Formation (WF) processes. With examples from the lexical network of emotion, Martina Lampert and Günther Lampert present and assess the notion of recombinance as against usage-based models of morphology in the representation of complex WF processes. Questioning proposals of a clear-cut dichotomy between synchrony and diachrony, Livio Gaeta examines if certain cases of homonymy/polysemy in Luxembourgish and Italian can be traced back to natural patterns of cognitively-grounded processes of diachronic evolution. Gerhard B van Huyssteen seeks to redefine and postulate a taxonymy of component-structures of complex words in Afrikaans for the purposes of developing a morphological parser. Working within a network approach to information-processing and drawing data from multiple sources, Hilke Elsen stresses on the significant role that words operating as gestalts play in language processing. Philipp Conzett views gender as an integral part of cognitive grammar and a constitutive factor in WF processes by arguing that diachronically, grammatical gender patterning is an efficient reuse of existing linguistic structures. Investigating Adjective+Noun compounds and phrases in Dutch and German from a constructionist perspective, Matthias Hüning argues that lexicon and grammar are seen to exist in a continuum and not as two distinct modules of a language.

Part 2, ‘Theory and processes of word formation’, explores a cognitive linguistics analysis of traditional WF processes. Réka Benczes discusses the motivations for creativity in English compounds and explains the compounds in terms of constructional schemas and conceptual blending. Analyzing hybrid compounds in German, Alexander Onysko discusses the associative relationship between the specifier and the head element in determinative compound nouns in terms of dynamic prototypicality and instantiation of inherently contiguous sub-groups. Problematizing unidirectional theories on conversion, Birgit Umbreit argues for a bidirectional understanding of lexical motivation in conversion by providing evidence from cognitive word-family organization and other sources. Bert Cappelle shows that double -er coinages (e.g. fixer-upper) are not necessarily intentional performance errors and reviews challenges it poses to usage-based accounts by exploring the role of imitation and analogy in its use. Taking up the issue of holistic versus decomposed processing of complex forms, Judith Heide, Antje Lorenz, André Meinunger, and Frank Burchert investigate how prefixed words are represented and processed in the mental lexicon focusing on ver-prefixed German verbs. Describing a fully-automated system called Zeitgeist which harvests neologisms from Wikipedia and adds semantic entries to WordNet, Tony Veale and Cristina Butnariu argue that lexical databases should be capable of interpreting neologisms with origins in existing word forms.

This book discusses language as a product of human cognition and the potential fallacies of a rule-based approach to word-formation. The papers included in this collection provide novel insights into issues like coining, the persistence of morphologically marked forms, and compositional and holistic processing of complex forms.