Morphological regularities and patterns in English word formation

The aim of this study is to identify the main morphological constructions, patterns, regularities and paradigms involved in English word formation. The study is based on a sample of 32,000 words, which are analyzed morphologically and etymologically by means of formal morphological analysis and which, together with their corresponding metalinguistic morphological patterns, constitute a morphological metacorpus—the key practical undertaking of this thesis. With this metacorpus, different quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the English lexicon have been obtained. The main methodology of this thesis is formal morphological analysis (Bratchikov 1958; Tyshchenko 1969, 2003). This method includes distinguishing the morphological elements of a lexeme and encoding them with a metalanguage, specifically designed for this purpose. The inner morphological structure of each word is verified with the help of the Oxford Etymological Dictionary. The metacorpus is classified and analyzed with the help of Visual Basic macros and the method of matrix optimization, which reveal precise morphological constructions and regularities of English word formation. Their different quantitative and qualitative aspects are further explored with different statistical techniques (e.g. graph analysis, regression, relative entropy and clustering). Thus, generalizations about English word formation are made on the basis of the analyzed data and with the metalinguistic terminology framework that has emerged in the course of the analysis, which means that some aspects of the description are new to the field and not previously discussed in the literature. Nevertheless, the thesis findings also verify some assumptions about English word formation postulated in other word-formation theories. The major problems substantiated in this thesis concern (a) constraints of suffix ordering (Plag 1996), (b) Unitary-Base Hypothesis (Aronoff 1976), (c) the impact of type frequency of morphemes and of morphological patterns on English word-formation grammar, and (c) the degree of the expression of such typological morphological characteristics as agglutination, isolation and fusion (Greenberg 1960; Sapir 1921) in English word formation. In addition to their theoretical value, the findings of this thesis have potential to be used for designing learning vocabulary at different stages of second language acquisition, for teaching English derivational morphology and for developing a morphological parser