Lexical relatedness

Abstract

This chapter provides a detailed survey of the various ways in which words can be related. It discusses transpositions (action nominalizations, deverbal participles, relational and possessive adjectives, property nominalizations of adjectives, and predicatively used nouns/adjectives) as well as the notion of mixed category. The chapter then addresses the question of meaning-bearing inflections: how do we know when the added meaning is ‘merely’ inflectional, and when it introduces an additional semantic predicate into the SEM attribute for the lexeme, characteristic of derivation? It is proposed that derivation entails a change in the value of the lexemic index. The chapter then reviews argument structure alternations (passives, causatives, applicatives, and others), as well as an intermediate type of relatedness called argument nominalization, which defines/denotes one of the arguments of a verb, typically the subject. There follows discussion of non-compositional (‘meaningless’) derivational processes, such as the prefixation which gives rise to words such as withstand, withhold, etc. The chapter then provides a systematic characterization of evaluative morphology. The next type is within-lexeme relatedness, which frequently throws up instances of morphosyntactic or category mismatch or category mixing. Not infrequently, this within-lexeme category mixing gives rise to mixed behaviour in the syntax, too (syntagmatic category mixing), a phenomenon very well known from studies of event nominalizations, but one which is much more widespread and general than that. The chapter surveys Russian nouns with adjectival morphology, conversion of adjectives to person-denoting nouns, morphological shift (Russian past tense morphology, Kayardild verbal case).