Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-7b9c58cd5d-wdhn8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-03-13T14:18:02.326Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - Construction Morphology and Relational Morphology

from Part I - The Constructional View of Language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2025

By
Jenny Audring  and
Ray Jackendoff
Edited by
Mirjam Fried  and
Kiki Nikiforidou
Mirjam Fried
Affiliation:
Univerzita Karlova
Kiki Nikiforidou
Affiliation:
University of Athens, Greece
Get access

Summary

The framework of Construction Grammar extends naturally to morphology. Constructions in a lexicon–grammar continuum elegantly capture the regularities and idiosyncrasies that typically co-occur in complex words. Yet, Construction Morphology is not just Construction Grammar applied to morphology. Morphological phenomena come with their own challenges and place specific demands on the theory. This chapter outlines the contributions that a constructionist approach to morphology makes to constructionist thinking more broadly. The focus is on two construction-based approaches: Construction Morphology and Relational Morphology. Three topics are highlighted especially. First, idiomaticity and other types of non-compositionality are discussed in the context of the relations within and across morphological constructions. Second, the chapter addresses productivity, specifically limited productivity as is often seen in word-formation. The third topic is paradigmaticity and the role of ‘horizontal’ connections between complex words and between morphological schemas. The chapter aims to show that morphology, the grammar of words, is instructive for the larger theoretical framework.

Keywords

morphologyword-formationinflectionidiomaticitynon-compositionalityproductivityparadigmaticityrelationalityConstruction MorphologyRelational Morphology
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Construction Grammar , pp. 101 - 128
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anshen, F. & Aronoff, M. (1997). Morphology in real time. In Yearbook of Morphology 1996. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, pp. 9–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aronoff, M. (1976). Word Formation in Generative Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Audring, J. (2019). Mothers or sisters? The encoding of morphological knowledge. Word Structure, 12(3), 274–296.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Audring, J. (2022). Advances in morphological theory: Construction Morphology and Relational Morphology. Annual Review of Linguistics, 8(1), 39–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barðdal, J. (2008). Productivity: Evidence from Case and Argument Structure in Icelandic. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bauer, L. (2001). Morphological Productivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bauer, L. (2005). Productivity: Theories. In Štekauer, P. & Lieber, R., eds., Handbook of Word-Formation. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, pp. 315–334.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bauer, L., Lieber, R., & Plag, I. (2013). The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blevins, J. P. (2006). Word-Based Morphology. Journal of Linguistics, 42(3), 531–573.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blevins, J. P. (2016). Word and Paradigm Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blevins, J. P., Ackerman, F. & Malouf, R. (2019). Word and paradigm morphology. In Audring, J. & Masini, F., eds., The Oxford Handbook of Morphological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 265–284.Google Scholar
Bochner, H. (1993). Simplicity in Generative Morphology. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Booij, G. (1993). Against split morphology. In Booij, G. & Van Marle, J., eds., Yearbook of Morphology 1993. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 27–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Booij, G. (1996). Inherent versus contextual inflection and the split morphology hypothesis. In Booij, G. & van Marle, J., eds., Yearbook of Morphology 1995. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 1–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Booij, G. (2010). Construction Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Booij, G. (2017). Inheritance and motivation in Construction Morphology. In Gisborne, N. & Hippisley, A., eds., Defaults in Morphological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 18–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Booij, G., ed. (2018). The Construction of Words. Advances in Construction Morphology, Vol. 4. Cham: Springer International Publishing.Google Scholar
Booij, G. & Audring, J. (2018). Partial motivation, multiple motivation: The role of output schemas in morphology. In Booij, G., ed., The Construction of Words. Advances in Construction Morphology. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 59–80.Google Scholar
Booij, G. & Masini, F. (2015). The role of second order schemas in the construction of complex words. In Bauer, L., Körtvélyessy, L., & Štekauer, P., eds., Semantics of Complex Words, Vol. 3. Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 47–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, J. (2010). Language, Usage and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, J. (2013). Usage-based theory and exemplar representations of constructions. In Hoffmann, T. & Trousdale, G., eds., The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 49–69.Google Scholar
Cappelle, B. (2006). Particle placement and the case for ‘allostructions’. In Constructions Online, SV1-7, 1–28.Google Scholar
Culicover, P. W. (1999). Syntactic Nuts: Hard Cases, Syntactic Theory, and Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Culicover, P. W. & Jackendoff, R. S. (2005). Simpler Syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Haas, W. & Trommelen, M. (1993). Morfologisch handboek van het Nederlands: Een overzicht van de woordvorming. ’s-Gravenhage: SDU Uitgevers.Google Scholar
De Saussure, F. (1959). Course in General Linguistics. (Translation of Cours de linguistique générale, 1915). New York: Philosophical Library.Google Scholar
De Smet, H. (2020). What predicts productivity? Theory meets individuals. Cognitive Linguistics, 31(2), 251–278.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diessel, H. (2015). Usage-based construction grammar. In Dąbrowska, E. & Divjak, D., eds., Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 296–322.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diessel, H. (2019). The Grammar Network: How Linguistic Structure Is Shaped by Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diewald, G. (2020). Paradigms lost – paradigms regained: Paradigms as hyper-constructions. In Sommerer, L. & Smirnova, E., eds., Nodes and Networks in Diachronic Construction Grammar. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 278–315.Google Scholar
Fehringer, C. (2004). How stable are morphological doublets? A case study of /ə/ ~ Ø variants in Dutch and German. Journal of Germanic Linguistics, 16(4), 285–329.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gaeta, L. & Angster, M. (2019). Stripping paradigmatic relations out of the syntax. Morphology, 29, 249–270.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gisborne, N. (2019). Word grammar morphology. In Audring, J. & Masini, F., eds., The Oxford Handbook of Morphological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 327–345.Google Scholar
Goldberg, A. E. (1995). Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Gurevich, O. (2006). Constructional Morphology: The Georgian Version. PhD thesis. University of California at Berkeley.Google Scholar
Hay, J. (2001). Lexical frequency in morphology: Is everything relative? Linguistics, 39(6), 1041–1070.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hay, J. & Baayen, H. (2002). Parsing and productivity. In Booij, G. & Van Marle, J., eds., Yearbook of Morphology 2001. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, pp. 203–235.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hilpert, M. (2021). Ten Lectures on Diachronic Construction Grammar. Leiden: Brill.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Höder, S. (2019). Phonological schematicity in multilingual constructions: A diasystematic perspective on lexical form. Word Structure, 12(3), 334–352.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hoffmann, T. (2022). Construction Grammar: The Structure of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hudson, R. (2007). Language Networks: The New Word Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Jackendoff, R. S. (1975). Morphological and semantic regularities in the lexicon. Language, 51(3), 639–671.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackendoff, R. S. (1983). Semantics and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Jackendoff, R. S. (1990). Semantic Structures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Jackendoff, R. S. (1997). The Architecture of the Language Faculty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Jackendoff, R. S. (2002). Foundations of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackendoff, R. S. & Audring, J. (2019). Relational morphology in the parallel architecture. In Audring, J. & Masini, F., eds., The Oxford Handbook of Morphological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 390–408.Google Scholar
Jackendoff, R. S. & Audring, J. (2020). The Texture of the Lexicon. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kapatsinski, V. (2022). Morphology in a parallel, distributed, interactive architecture of language production. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 5, 803259.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kapatsinski, V. & Vakareliyska, C. M. (2013). [N][N] compounds in Russian. A growing family of constructions. Constructions and Frames, 5(1), 69–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kay, P. (2013). The limits of (Construction) Grammar. In Hoffmann, T. & Trousdale, G., eds., The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 32–48.Google Scholar
Kempf, L. (2016). Adjektivsuffixe in Konkurrenz. Wortbildungswandel vom Frühneuhochdeutschen zum Neuhochdeutschen. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Köpcke, K.-M. & Panther, K. U. (2016). Analytische und gestalthafte Nomina auf -er im Deutschen vor dem Hintergrund konstruktionsgrammatischer Überlegungen. In Bittner, A. & Spieß, C., eds., Formen und Funktionen. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter, pp. 85–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kotowski, S. (2020). The semantics of English out-prefixation: A corpus-based investigation. English Language and Linguistics, 25(1), 61–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Langacker, R. W. (2019). Morphology in Cognitive Grammar. In Audring, J. & Masini, F., eds., The Oxford Handbook of Morphological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 346–364.Google Scholar
Leino, J. & Östman, J.-O. (2005). Constructions and variability. In Fried, M. & Boas, H. C., eds., Grammatical Constructions: Back to the Roots. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 191–213.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Masini, F. & Audring, J. (2019). Construction morphology. In Audring, J. & Masini, F., eds., The Oxford Handbook of Morphological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 365–389.Google Scholar
Nesset, T. (2008). Abstract Phonology in a Concrete Model: Cognitive Linguistics and the Morphology-Phonology Interface. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Norde, M. & Morris, C. (2018). Derivation without category change: A network-based analysis of diminutive prefixoids in Dutch. In Van Goethem, K., Norde, M., Coussé, E., & Vanderbauwhede, G., eds., Category Change from a Constructional Perspective. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 47–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Orgun, C. O. (1996). Sign-Based Morphology and Phonology with Special Attention to Optimality Theory. PhD dissertation. University of California, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Pijpops, D., Speelman, D., Van de Velde, F., & Grondelaers, S. (2021). Incorporating the multi-level nature of the constructicon into hypothesis testing. Cognitive Linguistics, 32(3), 487–528.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Plag, I. (2003). Word Formation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Plag, I., Dalton-Puffer, Ch., & Baayen, H. (1999). Morphological productivity across speech and writing. English Language and Linguistics, 3(2), 209–228.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rastle, K., Davis, M. H., & New, B. (2004). The broth in my brother’s brothel: Morpho-orthographic segmentation in visual word recognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 11(6), 1090–1098.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rhodes, R. A. (1992). What is a morpheme? A view from Construction Grammar. In Buszard-Welcher, L. A., Wee, L., & Weigel, W., eds., Proceedings of the 18th Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society, pp. 409–423.Google Scholar
Riehemann, S. Z. (1998). Type-based derivational morphology. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, 2(1), 49–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Riehemann, S. Z. (2001). A Constructional Approach to Idioms and Word Formation. PhD thesis. Stanford University.Google Scholar
Sommerer, L. & Baumann, A. (2021). Of absent mothers, strong sisters and peculiar daughters: The constructional network of English NPN constructions. Cognitive Linguistics, 32(1), 97–131.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sommerer, L. & Smirnova, E., eds., (2020). Nodes and Networks in Diachronic Construction Grammar. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spencer, A. (2013). Lexical Relatedness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Suttle, L. & Goldberg, A. E. (2011). The partial productivity of constructions as induction. Linguistics, 49(6), 1237–1269.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van de Velde, F. (2014). Degeneracy: The maintenance of constructional networks. In Boogaart, R., Colleman, T., & Rutten, G., eds., Extending the Scope of Construction Grammar. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 141–179.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van der Spuy, A.. (2017). Construction Morphology and inflection. Lingua, 199, 60–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weidhaas, T. & Schmid, H.-J. (2015). Diminutive verbs in German: Semantic analysis and theoretical implications. Morphology, 25(2), 183–228.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×