This chapter explores the morphological poverty of the Chinese from an empirical perspective. Until recently, the nature of affixation in Chinese is still not well recognized and has been one of the hotly debated topics in Chinese morphology. Based on the CKIP Morphological Database (incl. 4025 “affixes” in Chinese), this chapter covers the issue of the lack of affixation in Chinese based on a range of linguistic facts and empirical arguments such as lack of productivity and irregularities in word-formation rules.

This chapter begins with the basics of affixation, including the types of morphemes that are commonly found in English (prefixes, suffixes, bound bases, formatives, extenders). Students learn to formulate word formation rules, to represent the internal structure of complex words with tree structures, and to understand difficulties that arise in segmenting words. The chapter also considers the range of meanings that derivational affixes can express. It includes a section on compounding that considers the difficulties in defining what a compound is, the notion of headedness, and the types of compounds that are common in English. The chapter also briefly considers minor types of word formation such as backformation, blending, acronyms, initialisms, and coinage. Students are taught to use corpora such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English to find their own morphological data.

In Chapter 3, students explore the principles behind morphology and syntax. Students are led through a variety of examples that illustrate a range of morphological phenomena. Discover Activities prompt individual analysis to reinforce salient points. After discussing a few of the ways languages’ morphology blends into their syntax, a full discussion of grammatical functions in the syntactic sense is undertaken. Progressing through question formation, movement, and word order, students then explore natural language examples that illustrate a variety of syntactic and morphological concepts.

This chapter gives an introductory overview of the strategies for forming words in the languages of mainland Southeast Asia. The chapter begins with a discussion of the form class distinctions that are found, including the categories of noun, verb, adjective, adposition, and adverb. Of the various processes for forming words, the chapter focuses on compounding and reduplication, which are relied upon widely in languages of the area, and affixation, which is a speciality of Austroasiatic languages in particular. The chapter features a section on the uses of tone in word formation, a feature of Hmong-Mien languages. Psycho-collocations are discussed: an area-wide form of compounding involving the mention of body parts to denote emotional and psychological states.

Word formation in Germanic languages mainly takes place by means of compounding and affixation. Compounds are usually right-headed, and there is often a linking element in N+N-compounds that derives historically from a case ending. In addition to endocentric compounds there are also copulative compounds. Compounding also takes place with roots of Greek and Latin origin that do not occur as words by themselves. Some compound constituents have developed into affixoids. Affixation is used to derive words of major categories: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Some of these affixes behave phonologically similar to compound constituents. Many nonnative affixes, identified on the basis of sets of borrowed nonnative complex words, are being used in word formation as well. Other mechanisms of word formation are affix substitution, conversion, reduplication, prosodic morphology, abbreviation, and blending. For the construction of numerals above 20, syntactic coordination may be used. The word formation patterns of Germanic languages have been strongly influenced by contact with Greek, Latin, and French. In addition, they have been influenced by contact with English. Individual languages have borrowed some of their morphology and complex words from another Germanic language, and Yiddish has been strongly influenced by various non-Germanic languages.