Author:
Brian D. Joseph EALTSeries Managing Editor Columbus, Ohio USA

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The Ancient Greek word παράδειγµα, the source of the term that furnishes the first and key word in the title of this volume and provides the notion that unifies its nine substantial chapters, originally meant an architect’s or sculptor’s ‘model’. More germane to the volume at hand, it also meant ‘pattern’, and that is the sense that most directly informs the linguistic concepts of paradigm and concomitantly, paradigmatic relation, that are the focus of this latest contribution to the Empirical Approaches to Linguistic Theory (EALT) series, Paradigmatic Relations in Word Formation.

This word παράδειγµα had other meanings in Ancient Greek as well, and interestingly, many of its extended meanings are relevant to the present volume:

  • For instance, it meant (and still does mean in Modern Greek) ‘example’ and to be sure, there are a good many examples in this book, drawn from a number of different languages, those well-represented in the literature (Arabic, Dutch, English, French, Italian, Latin, Russian), those less well represented (Dogon, Rikbaktsa, Vietnamese), and those in-between (Czech, Slovak).

  • It could also mean ‘lesson’, and there are certainly lessons to be learned from the studies in this volume about derivation, about inflection, about networks of words, about different kinds of connections among words—semantic, formal, and other—and so on.

  • Another meaning was ‘argument’, in the sense of an element of a proof in philosophical debate, a meaning which clearly resonates with the nature of argumentation in linguistics and thus in evidence in the chapters here.

  • Finally, it could also mean ‘precedent’, and while this volume is not totally unprecedented, in that there are many works on morphology and on derivation today as morphological investigation is becoming, or has become, a distinct subfield within linguistics in the past few decades, it is setting a precedent by addressing various open issues—what the editors call “unsettled matters” (pp. 12–13) in morphological analysis and theory.

Each new volume of EALT offers something important to the scholarly world and with this work, editors Jesús Fernández-Domínguez, Alexandra Bagasheva, and Cristina Lara-Clares, along with the ten other authors whose work is showcased here, are offering an interesting and insightful group of studies that elucidate the role of the notion of “paradigm” in word-formation processes. Indeed, through these studies, it becomes evident how patterns—παραδεἰγµατα—are as essential for the understanding of word formation and derivational morphology as they are for the understanding of inflectional morphology.

Brian D. Joseph

EALT Series Managing Editor

Columbus, Ohio USA

25 July 2020

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