English Compounds and their Spelling

by Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer

Overview

Anyone writing texts in English is constantly faced with the unavoidable question whether to use open spelling (drinking fountain), hyphenation (far-off) or solid spelling (airport) for individual compounds. While some compounds commonly occur with alternative spellings, others show a very clear bias for one form. This book tests over 60 hypotheses and explores the patterns underlying the spelling of English compounds from a variety of perspectives. Based on a sample of 600 biconstituent compounds with identical spelling in all reference works in which they occur (200 each with open, hyphenated and solid spelling), this empirical study analyses large amounts of data from corpora and dictionaries and concludes that the spelling of English compounds is not chaotic but actually correlates with a large number of statistically significant variables. An easily applicable decision tree is derived from the data and an innovative multi-dimensional prototype model is suggested to account for the results.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781316647905
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	09/24/2020
Series:	Studies in English Language
Pages:	420
Product dimensions:	9.06(w) x 5.91(h) x 0.98(d)

About the Author

Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer is a senior lecturer in English linguistics at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. She has published widely on many diverse topics. Her books include Consociation and Dissociation: An Empirical Study of Word-Family Integration in English and German (2008), Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English Volume 16: Can We Predict Linguistic Change? (2015) and Variational Text Linguistics: Revisiting Register in English (2016).

Table of Contents

1. Introduction; Part I. Theoretical Background: 2. Delimitating the compound concept; 3. The normative background; Part II. Empirical Study of English Compound Spelling: 4. Material and method; 5. Potential determinants of English compound spelling; Part III. Modelling English Compound Spelling: 6. Compound spelling heuristics; 7. Modelling English compound spelling; 8. Summary and conclusion.

Editorial Reviews

'The investigation successfully explains why and how English compounds are orthographically represented … The book will therefore prove convenient mainly for researchers with an interest in morphology and the lexicon who appreciate an empirical corpus-based approach to language. These readers will readily recognise the vast majority of concepts and models discussed, and at the same time they will easily become familiarized with the new ones thanks to the clear distribution of contents, evolving from simpler to more complex. All in all, this publication is a valuable resource for anyone who wishes to understand the variables affecting compound spelling and has previous experience in corpus analysis and research.' Jesús Fernández-Domínguez, LINGUIST List

From the Publisher