A corpus-based study into new combining forms in American English

Abstract This study examines 10 new combining forms (CFs) in American English from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives, based on data from the Corpus of Historical American English, the Corpus of Contemporary American English, and the News on the Web, as well as seven dictionaries. Through the lens of corpus and dictionary data alongside the construction­alisation approach, it is found that all the CFs are partially schematised and partly inherit their meanings from their source words. The constructional changes and constructionalisation of the CFs are accompanied by varying degrees of schematic extensions. The distinctions between their schemas are reflected in the semantic categories of the preceding elements, the differences in the appearance dates of these categories, and the word classes to which the preceding elements belong. This study further confirms that the formation of contemporary CFs may involve analogy and other word-formation schemas in addition to compounding and blending.