This book presents a comprehensive, data-rich, theory-neutral description of English word formation, including inflection and derivation, compounding, conversion, and such minor processes as subtractive morphology. It also offers analyses of the theoretical challenges these phenomena present. It is the first to make systematic use of large linguistic corpora, including the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the British National Corpus, and the American National Corpus by which, for example, the authors are able to measure the productivity of different patterns and to trace semantic developments as they happen. After setting out their methodology and theoretical assumptions, the authors describe word formation and inflection in contemporary English. They give equal weight to form and meaning and cover nominalizations, agentive forms, comparatives, root and synthetic compounds, as well as more recondite topics such as the abstract noun-forming suffixes -hood, -dom, and -ship, neoclassical compounds, and the morphology of numbers. They examine the relations between orthography and phonological form. While their focus is on contemporary morphology, they trace the history of phenomena wherever doing so helps to understand and explain current form and function. The final part of the book shows how the data assembled within it bear on current theoretical issues and reveal new lines of research. This outstanding book will interest all scholars and students of English and of linguistic morphology more generally.

This impressive volume will, for years to come, be an indispensable tool for researchers on English morphology. * Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, Morphology *
The depth and the amount of research that has gone into this work are impressive. The care and thoroughness with which the authors present the corpus-based data are exemplary, and their decision to downplay theory while including copious helpful references to a wide number of synchronic approaches is commendable. This work will be of value to scholars of all sorts who study English, providing analytical bases for later work, data for classroom problems, and rich material for browsing. It is also a fine example of international collaboration between leading morphologists from three continents. * The Linguistic Society of America *
It will be unputdownable for considerable time to anyone interested in 'words', how they yield to and defy morphological analysis, and how their incredible range of properties can be classified and commented upon by dyed-in-the-wool morphologists, employing 'modern' ways of data collecting. * Wim Zonneveld, Journal of Linguistics *
This comprehensive book, which covers all aspects of English morphology, is a needed reference work. * P.J. Kurtz, CHOICE *

Laurie Bauer is Professor of Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington. His books include English Word-formation (CUP 1983), Introducing Linguistic Morphology (2nd edn EUP 2003), Morphological Productivity (CUP 2001) and A Glossary of Morphology (EUP 2004). He is one of the editors of the journal Word Structure. Rochelle Lieber is Professor of Linguistics at the University of New Hampshire and author of Deconstructing Morphology (Chicago 1992), Morphology and Lexical Semantics (CUP 2004), and Introducing Morphology (CUP 2009). She is co-editor with Pavol Stekauer of the Oxford Handbooks of Compounding and Derivational Morphology (OUP 2009 and 2013). Ingo Plag is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf. His books include Morphological Productivity (Mouton de Gruyter 1999), Word-formation in English (CUP 2003), and Introduction to English Linguistics (with co-authors, Mouton de Gruyter 2009). He is co-editor of the journal Morphology.