The book enables students with little prior knowledge of linguistics to engage in their own analyses of complex words.

Ingo Plag is Professor of English Linguistics at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf. He has published extensively in various linguistics journals, is editor-in-chief of the journal Morphology and is a member of the editorial board of a number of international journals including English Language and Linguistics, the Journal of English Linguistics, the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, The Mental Lexicon and Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft. His most recent books are Introduction to English Linguistics (2015), The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology (2013), and Word Knowledge and Word Usage: A Cross-disciplinary Guide to the Mental Lexicon (forthcoming).

Preface to the first edition; Preface to the second edition; Abbreviations and notational conventions; Introduction: what this book is about and how it can be used; 1. Basic concepts; 1.1. What is a word?; 1.2. Studying word-formation; 1.3. Inflection and derivation; 1.4. Summary; Further reading; Exercises; 2. Studying complex words; 2.1. Identifying morphemes; 2.1.1. The morpheme as the minimal linguistic sign; 2.1.2. Problems with the morpheme: the mapping of form and meaning; 2.2. Allomorphy; 2.3. Establishing word-formation rules; 2.4. Multiple affixation and compounding; 2.5. Summary; Further reading; Exercises; 3. Productivity and the mental lexicon; 3.1. Introduction: what is productivity?; 3.2. Possible and actual words; 3.3. Complex words in the lexicon; 3.4. Measuring productivity; 3.5. Constraining productivity; 3.5.1. Pragmatic restrictions; 3.5.2. Structural restrictions; 3.5.3. Blocking; 3.6. Summary; Further reading; Exercises; 4. Affixation; 4.1. What is an affix?; 4.2. How to investigate affixes: more on methodology; 4.3. General properties of English affixation; 4.3.1. Phonological properties; 4.3.2. Morphological properties; 4.3.3. Semantic properties; 4.3.4. Classifying affixes; 4.4. Suffixes; 4.4.1. Nominal suffixes; 4.4.2. Verbal suffixes; 4.4.3. Adjectival suffixes; 4.4.4. Adverbial suffixes; 4.5. Prefixes; 4.6. Infixation; 4.7. Summary; Further reading; Exercises; 5. Derivation without affixation; 5.1. Conversion; 5.1.1. The directionality of conversion; 5.1.2. Conversion or zero-affixation?; 5.1.3. Conversion: syntactic or morphological?; 5.2. Prosodic morphology; 5.2.1. Truncations: truncated names, -y diminutives, and clippings; 5.2.2. Blends; 5.3. Abbreviations and acronyms; 5.4. Summary; Further reading; Exercises; 6. Compounding; 6.1. Recognising compounds; 6.1.1. What are compounds made of?; 6.1.2. More on the structure of compounds: the notion of head; 6.1.3. Canonical and non-canonical compounds; 6.1.4. Summary; 6.2. An inventory of compounding patterns; 6.3. Nominal compounds; 6.3.1. Headedness; 6.3.2. Interpreting nominal compounds; 6.3.3. Stress assignment; 6.4. Adjectival compounds; 6.5. Verbal compounds; 6.6; Neoclassical compounds; 6.7. Compounding: syntax or morphology?; 6.8. Summary; Further reading; Exercises; 7. Theoretical issues: modelling word-formation; 7.1. Introduction: why theory?; 7.2. Phonology-morphology interaction; 7.3. Affix ordering; 7.4. The nature of word-formation rules; 7.4.1. Morpheme-based morphology; 7.4.2. Word-based morphology; 7.4.3. Analogy; 7.4.4. Naive Discriminative Learning; 7.4.5. Summary; Further reading; Exercises; Answer key to exercises; Chapter 1; Chapter 2; Chapter 3; Chapter 4; Chapter 5; Chapter 6; Chapter 7; References; Index.