Morphology and Lexical Semantics (review)

That there is more to morphology than the formal structure of a construction has been one constant claim of linguists and often a matter of dispute between strictly formal accounts of word-formation and meaning-based approaches. In Morphology and lexical semantics, Lieber tries to prove that meaning really stands as one of the mainstays of word-formation, offering an insightful account of how it can be decomposed in a detailed manner.

The book is divided into seven well-balanced chapters, and is devised in such a way that Lieber’s theory is presented gradually for an easy understanding: after the Introduction (pp. 1–14), Chapter 1 (pp. 15–44) establishes some broad lexical semantic features which allow for making generalizations about the major word-classes, while Chapter 2 (pp. 45–75) introduces the device of co-indexation applied to root and synthetic compounds, and to certain affixes. Chapter 3 (pp. 76–97) provides an analysis of verb formation with special attention to conversion, and the whole descriptive system is extended in Chapter 4 (pp. 98–134). In Chapters 5 (pp. 135–153) and 6 (pp. 154–177), the theoretical apparatus is further developed, and some extensively discussed topics introduced, for example telicity as a lexical feature, or semantic mismatches. Finally, Chapter 7 (pp. 178–182) summarizes the contents of the book and formulates a number of questions for future research.

The overview offered in the Introduction is an effective summary of the state of the art in lexical semantics. Here, Lieber looks back and recapitulates some everlasting questions on the topic (e.g., the multiple-affix question or zero-derivation), from which it emerges that most traditional studies of word-formation have not supplied a systematic manner of studying its meaning, precisely what the author aims at in this work. Most importantly, Lieber presents in the introduction the general features of her theory: it is decompositional, lexical by nature, cross-categorial, and with a focus on complex words. As she explains, she conceives of lexical semantic representations as consisting of two parts: the skeleton and the body. The former concerns those aspects of meaning with “consequences for the syntax” (p. 10) and must be valid for all relevant word-classes (see Jackendoff 1990), while the latter is a non-decompositional part which comprises cultural and informational knowledge depending on each individual. Together they compose a lexical semantic representation as a whole and, once these characteristics are justified, everything is ready for the start of Chapter 1.

In the first episode proper, Lieber starts to build the necessary mechanisms for an accurate semantic analysis of word-formation. Out of the features of her theory, perhaps the one with the most direct bearing on the development of the book is decompositionality. While past approaches show a number of common points with Lieber’s (Szymanek 1988; Jackendoff 1990, 1991, 1996; Wierzbicka 1996), one of her recurrent claims is that none has been able to provide an adequate account for a detailed semantic analysis which is valid across categories. For this reason, she pursues to achieve atoms of meaning with the right “grain size”, which will allow not only describing but also predicting the facts of lexical semantics. To achieve such a goal, she first introduces the features [±material] and [±dynamic], the former related to the conceptual category of substances/things/essences, the latter to that of situations, in addition to the feature Inferable Eventual Position or State (hereafter [±IEPS]), relevant for the path component of meaning. Basing on earlier work (Lieber and Baayen 1997, 1999), Lieber builds a system for analysis of complex nouns, verbs, and adjectives (pp. 22–35), as well as derivational affixes (pp. 35–43), which serves as a starting point for her framework.

Chapter 2 discusses co-indexation, that is, the device necessary “to tie together the arguments that come with different parts of a complex word” (p. 45), so that the meaning of the whole is...