Abstract
The ability of language to expand the lexicon by combining and recombining morphemes brings great advantages for both the language comprehension and its production. It enables the vocabulary of a language to develop from a considerably smaller set of morphemes, it allows new word-forms to be inserted in the lexicon of a language as easily comprehensible new lexemes in terms of their constituent morphemes and it permits the semantic relationship among words to be coded through sheered morphological elements.
A wide consensus seems to have supported the theory claiming that both syntactic and phonological structure of complex words in English is typically right-branching (Berg 2003, Phillips and Gibson 1997).
Right-branching is arguably considered as the tangible product of the cognitive process at a linguistic level of translating meaning into form. However, right-branching shows to be rather weak on the lexicon criterion, stronger on the morphological criterion (Libben 1994), and particularly strong on the phonological criterion Bermudèz-Otero and MacMahon 2003).
The present study aims at producing an analysis of the structure of morphologically complex words in English in order to determine whether it is flat of hierarchical, and in the latter hypothesis, if the bias is stronger towards left- or right- branching and , eventually, the consistency of the phenomenon throughout the entire English lexicon.