ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the study of lexis morphological treatments of word formation, the structural semanticist's treatment of sense relations, and the neo-Firthian approach to collocation. Where appropriate, the exemplify word formation patterns, sense relations, and collocations using either familiar English words, or data from the German subcorpus of GEPCOLT. As Sinclair points out, a 'word' is usually understood as an orthographic word: a word in the Roman alphabet is based on a string of letters including hyphen and sometimes apostrophe bounded on each side by a word space or another punctuation mark. The notion of lemma, like the notion of multi-word unit, is an abstraction away from word forms, which are co-terminous with orthographic words. Compounding and derivation are the two principal ways of forming new words in both German and English. The distinction between the two processes relies on another distinction, that between free and bound morphemes.
