The Semantics of Derivational Morphology

This book presents a synchronic and diachronic
investigation of two derivational English affixes. The
suffixes -age and -ery are analysed on the basis of
dictionary and corpus data and an adapted semantic
map method is introduced as a new way of accounting
for the semantic structure of derivatives. This
study shows that the semantic structure of morphological
categories can change signi ficantly over time,
and that semantic maps can represent this change in
a straightforward manner. The semantic maps visualise
the relations and interdependencies of the readings
expressed by derivatives, which leads to a new
understanding of the semantic complexity of these
categories.