This volume brings together cutting-edge research on the semantic properties of derived words and the processes by which these words are derived. To this day, many of these processes remain under-researched and the nature of meaning in derivational morphology remains ill-understood. All eight articles have an empirical focus and rely on carefully collected sets of data. At the same time, the contributions represent a broad variety of approaches. Several contributions deal with specific problems of the pairing of form and meaning, such as the rivalry between nominalizing suffixes or the semantic categories encoded by conversion pairs. Other articles tackle the more general question of how meaning is organized, e.g. whether there is evidence for the paradigmatic organization of derived words or the reality of the inflection-derivation dichotomy. The contributions feature innovative methodologies, such as representing lexical meaning as word distribution or predicting semantic properties by means of analogical algorithms. This volume offers new and highly interesting insights into how complex words mean, and offers directions for future research in an oft-neglected field.

This monographs investigates into the influence of the individual-/stage-level distinction (IL/SL) on order restrictions of multiple prenominal adjectives (AORs). It rejects the restriction regularly postulated-across different research frameworks-that SL-adjectives are being realized farther from the head noun than IL-adjectives, relegating the alleged constraint to an epiphenomenon of more general principles. While formal-theoretic hypotheses on AORs are formulated and put to the test empirically via a large corpus as well as two rating studies, the book also addresses adjective classification, modification patterns, and the IL-SL-debate in general. The preferred prenominal positions of typical SL-adjectives are argued to follow from their nature as absolute-gradable adjectives as well as from the distinction between object- and kind-modification. The empirical studies corroborate these considerations. The book critically discusses and opposes several well-established hypotheses on AORs, sketches a flexible and parsimonious syntax of adjectival modification, and will be of interest to syntacticians and semanticists working on DP-structure, the IL-SL-debate, and adjectival modification