The Semantics of Derivational Morphology : a Synchronic and Diachronic Investigation of the Suffixes -age and -ery in English

The present study is situated at the interface of morphology and lexical semantics. It investigates the semantics of two derivational English suffixes: -age and -ery. Although some recent investigations have started to study the semantics of affixation systematically (e.g. Lieber 2004), there are, on the whole, very few thorough accounts of the semantics of derivational morphology. This leads Lieber (2012: 2108) to claim that “the most neglected area of morphological theory in the last three decades has been derivational semantics”.