Derivation in the domain of multiword expressions

Multiword expressions and derivation have rarely been discussed together, even
though analyzing the interaction between them is of great importance for the study
of each topic and, in general, for the study of the language and for Natural Lan-
guage Processing. Derivation is a means of enriching the lexicon with both words
and multiword expressions. Various types of derivation (suffixation, prefixation or
both, as well as other derivational devices) can act upon either words or multiword
expressions. The focus of our work here is the formation of multiword expressions
from other multiword expressions via derivation. We analyze the morphological,
syntactic and semantic aspects of this process, providing examples from Roma-
nian and Bulgarian, languages, which belong to different families but have been in
contact throughout their history. The study can be further extended with data from
other languages. The perspective adopted here is paradigmatic, but the syntagmatic
approach, which can only be mentioned as further work, will add to the quality of
the analysis of facts: corpus data will contextualize the phenomena discussed here
and offer quantitative information about them.