Rochelle Lieber, professor of English and linguistics, has released her 10th volume, “English Nouns: The Ecology of Nominalization” published by Cambridge University Press. The book explores English nominalizations, defined as complex nouns that are derived from verbs, adjectives and other nouns (for example, the noun "legalization" derives from the verb "legalize").
Lieber uses data from Corpus of Contemporary American English to show that the syntactic patterns in which English nominalizations can be found and the range of possible readings they can express are very different from what has been claimed in past theoretical treatments. She argues that the relationship between form and meaning in the nominalization processes of English is virtually never one-to-one, but rather forms a complex web that can be likened to a derivational ecosystem.
Lieber is a theoretical linguist specializing in morphology and the mental lexicon. Other recent books include “The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology” (Oxford University Press, 2014, with Pavol Stekauer); “The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology” (Oxford University Press, 2013, with Laurie Bauer and Ingo Plag), which won the Linguistic Society of America's Bloomfield Award; and “Introducing Morphology” (Cambridge University Press, 2010). She has also published over 50 articles, reviews and book chapters, and serves on the editorial boards of several journals.
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Written By:
Susan Dumais '88 '02G | College of Liberal Arts
