Contrastive word-formation today: Retrospect and prospect

This paper proposes an exploratory bird's-eye view of contrastive word-formation research, an area which, to date, remains largely under-researched in the three fields in which it partakes, namely morphology, contrastive linguistics and lexicology. Studies in contrastive word-formation, as well as their meta-analysis in terms of scope, objectives and data, are presented in a critical survey of the literature, together with an extensive bibliography (1960–2010). A new contrastive methodology for future research is looked into and the major practical applications of contrastive word-formation in bilingual lexicography and translator training, among others, are overviewed. Contrastive word-formation, it is argued, should be set within a more rigorous theoretical and methodological framework, which would be characterised by a dynamic conception of the tertium comparationis and the use of empirical data drawn from multilingual corpora.