This special issue entitled "New Impulses in Word-Formation" demonstrates in thirteen individual, empirically oriented case studies how the methods gleaned from newer theoretical models (optimality theory, construction grammar, cognitive grammar, distributive morphology, parallel architecture) as well as from the linguistic sub-disciplines of psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, corpus linguistics and computational linguistics can be applied lucratively to the field of word-formation. The individual contributions are from a team of international linguists and deal with a broad spectrum of interests divided almost equally between the two major areas of word-formation, derivation and composition.