{"id":1537,"date":"2011-04-23T22:00:32","date_gmt":"2011-04-23T20:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=1537"},"modified":"2011-04-04T10:14:53","modified_gmt":"2011-04-04T08:14:53","slug":"1537","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=1537","title":{"rendered":"Cognitive perspectives on word formation"},"content":{"rendered":"
Cognitive perspectives on word formation<\/strong>. Ed. by Alexander Onysko<\/strong> and Sascha Michel<\/strong>. (Trends in linguistics. Studies and monographs 221.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2010. Pp. viii, 431. ISBN 9783110223590<\/a>. $140 (Hb).<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Anish Koshy<\/strong><\/a>, The English and Foreign Languages University, India<\/em><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Part 1, \u2018Theory and interfaces in word formation\u2019, deals with theoretical contributions, interface issues, and classification of Word Formation (WF) processes. With examples from the lexical network of emotion, Martina<\/strong> Lampert<\/strong> and G\u00fcnther Lampert<\/strong> 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<\/strong> 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<\/strong> 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<\/strong> stresses on the significant role that words operating as gestalts play in language processing. Philipp Conzett<\/strong> 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 H\u00fcning<\/strong> argues that lexicon and grammar are seen to exist in a continuum and not as two distinct modules of a language.<\/p>\n

Part 2, \u2018Theory and processes of word formation\u2019, explores a cognitive linguistics analysis of traditional WF processes. R\u00e9ka Benczes<\/strong> 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<\/strong> 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<\/strong> argues for a bidirectional understanding of lexical motivation in conversion by providing evidence from cognitive word-family organization and other sources. Bert Cappelle<\/strong> shows that double -er coinages (e.g. fixer-upper<\/em>) 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<\/strong>, Antje Lorenz<\/strong>, Andr\u00e9 Meinunger<\/strong>, and Frank Burchert<\/strong> investigate how prefixed words are represented and processed in the mental lexicon focusing on ver<\/em>-prefixed German verbs. Describing a fully-automated system called Zeitgeist<\/em> which harvests neologisms from Wikipedia and adds semantic entries to WordNet, Tony Veale<\/strong> and Cristina Butnariu <\/strong>argue that lexical databases should be capable of interpreting neologisms with origins in existing word forms.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cognitive perspectives on word formation. Ed. by Alexander Onysko and Sascha Michel. (Trends in linguistics. Studies and monographs 221.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2010. Pp. viii, 431. ISBN 9783110223590. $140 (Hb). Reviewed by Anish Koshy, The English and Foreign Languages University, India The contributions in the volume are selected papers from the Second International Cognitive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1537"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1537"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1537\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1539,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1537\/revisions\/1539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}