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Part of
Essays on Linguistic Realism
Edited by Christina Behme and Martin Neef
[Studies in Language Companion Series 196] 2018
► pp. 203–234

Chapter 8
Explaining linguistic facts in a realist theory of word formation

 | University of Szeged
The present paper examines foundational issues of a realist word-formation theory. A realist linguistic theory, as it is understood here, takes linguistic units and the linguistic systems that determine them to be abstract entities. With respect to such a word-formation theory, the following two questions are discussed:
1.
What are the word-formation facts to be described and explained or predicted?
2.
What linguistic objects are those word-formation facts about?
Presupposing the axiomatically formalized Pattern-and-Restriction Theory (PR), it is proposed that the word-formation facts to be described and explained or predicted are true statements of word-formation relations in the linguistic system under consideration, and that those facts are about abstract lexical units in the sense of the realist framework of Integrational Linguistics (IL). On the example of a word-formation pattern in some spoken Modern German system it is shown how deductive-nomological (DN) explanations or predictions of word-formation facts can be logically derived from theorems of the PR theory and theorems of a grammar and a dictionary of the linguistic system.
Keywords: axiomatic theory, word formation, conversion, deductive-nomological explanation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Lexical units
  • 3.Word-formation relations, processes, and patterns
  • 4.Explanation and prediction of statements of word-formation relations
    • 5.Summary and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 26 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.196.08nol
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