Abstract
The paper points out that in Czech linguistics, recent developments in word-formation are not reflected sufficiently, which holds true as well for empirically based criticisms of the core concept of morpheme. The paper introduces very briefly the framework of Construction Grammar, and goes on to argue on empirical grounds for a constructionist account of Czech word-formation.
The arguments are based on a) derivation-inflection interactions in Czech, b) the positional boundness of word-formation units, c) the non-compositional meaning (and yet the productivity) of certain morphological constructions, d) the impossibility of describing certain productive processes (e.g. those in the realm of prosodic morphology) purely with reference to morphemes, and e) various instances of complex constructions (zooming in especially on prefixation-valency interactions) which show that it is not sufficient to describe only the behavior of morphemes that are part of these more complex constructions. The paper calls for the reevaluation of Czech word-formation and attempts to illustrate that the above-mentioned phenomena cannot be adequately explained on a morpheme-based account, while the constructionist approach does not suffer from this deficiency.