Contrastive word-formation today: Retrospect and prospect

• Authors: Marie-Aude Lefer
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This paper proposes an exploratory bird’s-eye view of contrastive word-formation research, an area which, to date, remains largely under-researched in the three fields in which it partakes, namely morphology, contrastive linguistics and lexicology. Studies in contrastive word-formation, as well as their meta-analysis in terms of scope, objectives and data, are presented in a critical survey of the literature, together with an extensive bibliography (1960–2010). A new contrastive methodology for future research is looked into and the major practical applications of contrastive word-formation in bilingual lexicography and translator training, among others, are overviewed. Contrastive word-formation, it is argued, should be set within a more rigorous theoretical and methodological framework, which would be characterised by a dynamic conception of the tertium comparationis and the use of empirical data drawn from multilingual corpora.

Keywords

EN

word-formation; contrastive linguistics; cross-linguistic studies; tertium comparationis; corpus linguistics

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Journal: Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics
• Year: 2011
• Volume: 47
• Pages: 645

Dates

published

2011

received

2010-12-01

revised

2011-05-01

accepted

2011-06-20

Contributors

author

Marie-Aude Lefer

• Université catholique de Louvain and Institut Libre Marie Haps, Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/psicl-2011-0034