“Historical English Word-Formation” – Call for Papers

In its development from Old English to today, the English vocabulary underwent a radical restructuring due to an enormous influx of (complex) lexemes from Latin, Anglo-Norman, French, Greek, and other languages. Even though historical linguistics has traced and investigated many aspects of the complex mechanisms of language contact involved in all levels of language, studies on historical word-formation are comparatively rare (cf., e.g., Kastovsky 1968 and 2007; Faiß 1992; Sauer 1992; Ciszek 2008; Fisiak/Bator 2013; see also further below). For this reason, our 2023 symposium at Munich University focuses on English word-formation from the earliest texts to the Late Modern English period. We invite studies in Old, Middle, and/or Early and Late Modern English with a specifically historical perspective, working with different theoretical and methodological approaches – functional, semantic, socio-pragmatic, sociolinguistic, cognitive, computational, etc.