Alexander Lakaw

(A)wake: Corpus-based Investigations of Two Verb Pairs and the Prefix A- Alexander Lakaw

Prefixes play a bigger role in language development than they are given credit for. Within the study of language, it is for instance a widely accepted assumption that many, if not most prefixes derived from lexical items themselves. With regard to many linguistic disciplines, like semantics and language development, there is a lack of sufficient information about prefixes, and therefore they should be studied more intensively. The two independent but thematically related corpus-based studies in this book attempt to do exactly that. By means of quantitative and qualitative analyses, this book investigates the two verb pairs 'arise/rise' and 'awake/wake'. It focuses on investigating the meanings of the verbs in question, their semantic specialisations, and the semantic relation of the specific verb pair constituents. Furthermore, tendencies of language change are investigated, and the influence of the prefix 'a-' on those tendencies is discussed. Due to its broad focus, touching on topics like corpus linguistics, phraseology, semantics and language development, this book is very useful for new and advanced students of language, as well as for researchers or teachers of linguistics.