Affixes and Derivatives Across the Humanities and Social Sciences

Providing a systematic approach to English academic writing for the Humanities and Social Sciences, this book examines the word-formation patterns typical of discourse across distinct academic disciplines.
Academic writing for research requires lexical sophistication, as it often addresses abstract concepts needing unique names, and a skilful use of complex derived/affixed words. The author provides data that allows for addressing the issues of expanding the learners' vocabulary, the development of vocabulary skills and the cultivation of derivational awareness in a targeted manner.


The book consists of eight chapters. The first two provide a general overview of written academic English for research and publication purposes across the Humanities and Social Sciences and present the whole derivational system of contemporary English. English affixes are introduced through syntactic categories, such as derived nouns, derived verbs and derived adjectives. Chapters 3 to 5 contain the results of analyses conducted with the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). In chapters 6 and 7, the methodology adopted shifts from automatic corpus search to manual data collection resulting from the close reading of specialist texts. Finally, chapter 8 shows how the analyses can be transferred to areas such as academic writing for research, writing for specific/professional purposes, creative writing, and translation.


Offering rich insights into English derivation, this book will benefit researchers engaged in the Humanities and Social Sciences and appeal to linguists specializing in morphological theory, as well as language teaching professionals and EAP curriculum designers.