Word Formation without the Morpheme

This diachronic study brings clipping processes, blending, and suffix reinterpretation together in support of the argument that all word formation must be systematic. These three processes are all part of morphology as they deal with word formation; the notion of morpheme, however, does not play any role in these changes. This may be the reason why these three processes of word formation have been dismissed as accidental phenomena, undeserving of further analysis. In this book, Camiel Hamans uses examples from English and Dutch morphology and targets specialists in morphology and historical linguistics. The underlying assumption of Hamans' research is that word-formation processes are systematic, not random or haphazard, based on the rationale that, if language changes were haphazard, interlocutors would see their chances of properly understanding each other heavily diminished. It is highly unlikely that word formation consists of two completely different parts: a morphemic one which is systematic and a non-morphemic one which is not. The results presented in this volume show that non-morphemic processes of word formation are not all chaotic.