Acknowledgements

The specific motivation for the research presented in this monograph emerged while I was preparing an earlier article on the interaction between register effects and the use of complex verbs (Laws & Ryder, 2018). I was already well aware of the seminal work of Plag (1999) and Lieber (2004) on the polysemous nature of the suffixes -ize, -ify, -en and -ate and I had hoped to include a summary of their distributional characteristics across the semantic categories discussed in those works. However, I quickly found that this exercise was taking on the proportions of a whole new research project: an initial pilot study revealed that such an endeavour would benefit from the analysis of additional information, such as the etymological origin of all derivative types attested and the individual analysis of derivative senses in context – this was a major undertaking for a dataset of 22,000 tokens. So the project was postponed to another day and the results are reported in this volume.

There are many people I would like to acknowledge for a variety of reasons. Firstly, I would particularly like to thank the two raters who worked closely with me at two critical points during the semantic analysis phase discussed in Chapter 5. They are Jill Bowie, who reviewed the initial classification of -ize derivative senses, and Roopa Leonard, who reviewed the multiple senses of the derivative identify. These contributions were invaluable and ensured that the work could move forward with independent validation. I would also like to acknowledge the hard work and dedication that research assistant Elena Crowle and my colleague Chris Ryder put into the very early stages of compiling the datasets and conducting the initial semantic analysis of complex verbs in context; that work provided the building blocks upon which the current project was developed.

I would like to express my sincere thanks to the editorial team of this linguistics series on Constructional Approaches to Language, particularly Jan-Ola Östman, whose encouragement and support during the production of this monograph have been truly motivating, and also the desk editor, Isja Conen, who has been so helpful and prompt in answering my endless list of questions.

I would like to thank Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press for granting me permission to reproduce verbatim definitions of the several hundred complex verbs in the dataset from the Oxford English Dictionary online and the Cambridge Dictionary online.

There are various friends who have shown a real interest in this work and I would like to thank them in alphabetical order: Anna, Jennifer, Penny, Sandy, Sharon and Sue. And finally, I profusely thank my wonderful husband Mike, whose unstinting support and witty observations have made this journey immeasurably more enjoyable for me. This book is dedicated to him.