Sundby, Bertil: English word-formation

In the early English grammar-books, word-formation tends to be split between grammar and the lexicon, but in the present monograph it is studies in its own right. The main part of the book is taken up by an alphabetical list of entries clarifying technical terms (e.g. antimeria, decompound, mule-words), the use and status of affixes (e.g. -ful, -hood, -like and rival forms such as -ance:-ence, de-:dis-, in-:un-), problems and principles of classification (cf., e.g., composition, derivation, etymology), and various other topics in the realm of theory or usage. The entries run to anything from two or three lines (e.g. de-, -ity, with-) to several pages (e.g. hyphen, inseparable, sound-symbolism). The Introduction sums up the state of the art and includes a discussion of method, a guide to the use of the Dictionary, comments on its sources (156 in all), and lists of entries, literary texts quoted by the grammarians, labels (‘affected’, ‘corrupt’, ‘obsolete’, etc.), and findings. On the normative side, the book is a follow-up to A Dictionary of English Normative Grammar 1700-1800 (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1991). Studia Anglistica Norvegica 7.