LANGUAGE IN INDIA Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow Volume 3 : 7 July 2003 Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D. Associate Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D. Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D. B. A. Sharada, Ph.D. STRATEGIES IN THE FORMATION OF NOUNS IN TAMIL S. Rajendran, Ph.D. Introduction The theory of word formation propounded by many including Aronof (1976) and Bauer (1983) in general aims to cater to lexicon with word formation rules. As the dictionaries become unending list of words, it become inevitable for us to capture this unending growth of dictionaries by understating the productivity in the formation of lexical items in terms of nonce formation coupled with semantic extension by polysemy. Pustejovsky (1996) views the lexicon as generative. He tries to capture polysemy by means of generative mechanism. We find many lexical items listed in dictionaries as the lexicographers find them idiosyncratic in their formation and/or meaning. But a semantic lexicon should explain these idiosyncrasies, and then only it can severe as a useful tool complementing a grammar. The semantic lexicon, unlike a lexicographer’s lexicon should explain the creativity of formation of new words or new meaning from the already existing stock. So it is proposed here to understand the formation of nouns form the already existing lexical items without bothering about the productivity of the concerned word formation rules. The formation of nouns in Tamil is explained keeping in mind the creative aspect of lexical items. Nouns can be formed from the words belonging to all parts of speech in Tamil. Based on the grammatical category from which the nouns are derived, the derivation of nouns can be classified mainly into: Formation of nouns from nouns Formation of nouns form verbs Formation of nouns from adjectives