Borrowing of Morphology: With a case study of Baltic and Slavic verbal prefixes (original) (raw)
Related papers
Slavic Prefixes and Morphology : An Introduction to the Nordlyd volume
Nordlyd, 2005
This is an introduction to a special volume of Nordlyd available at http://www.ub.uit.no/munin/nordlyd/. It outlines those aspects of Slavic verbal morphology which are of relevance to the papers in the volume, explaining various background assumptions, analytic motivations, and glossing conventions along the way, with reference to the papers in the volume. A full list of abbreviations for all the papers is provided in the last section.
Inheritance and secondary similarities in the inflectional morphology of Baltic and Slavic
The paper deals with the doubling in the adjective inflection of Baltic and Slavic due to emergence of the category of definiteness. The category of definiteness encoded exclusively by a special set of adjectival inflections is a typologically uncommon feature. The particular patterns of encoding definiteness in Baltic and Slavic by case-forms of a cliticised relative pronoun are virtually identical. At the same time, clear differences between Baltic and Slavic preclude a reconstruction of inflectionally encoded definiteness for the common prehistory of the languages. Finally, a special definite inflection of adjectives is known from a further Indo-European branch of Central Europe, i.e. Germanic, where the definiteness is encoded in an entirely different way. The paper shows, that the inflectional category of definiteness in Baltic and Slavic is best explained as having arisen by grammaticalisation due to contact with ancient Germanic dialects.
Morphological adaptation of adjectival borrowings in modern Lithuanian
In this article, the following types of morphological adaptation of borrowed adjectives in Lithuanian are identified: (1) zero adaptation, (2) assignment to inflection class (IC), (3) addition of derivational suffix, (4) substitution of derivational suffix, (5) truncation of derivational suffix. Zero adaptation is very rare in internationalisms, but appears quite frequently in slang borrowings. Assignment to ICs is noted in internationalisms and slang borrowings with nearly complementary distribution of ICs in-us and-as. Addition of derivational suffixes is rare, but available in non-standard use and also possible, but difficult to prove, in internationalisms. Substitution of derivational suffixes is the main strategy for adaptation of internationalisms, the central role being played by the relational suffix-in-is. Truncation of derivational suffixes is very rare and is noted only in internationalisms where affixes of Latin origin can be occasionally deleted.
Besters-Dilger, J. et al. (eds): Congruence in contact-induced language change. Language families, typological resemblance, and perceived similarity. Boston-Berlin (2014), 352-367. (Linguae & litterae 27), 2014
At the beginning of the 19th century, the majority of Slavonic speaking peoples lived in the multiethnic Habsburg and Ottoman empires, where most of today’s Slavonic standard languages were only on the threshold of standardization and had a rather narrow range of functional domains. In these circumstances, the language-question was one of the most vital issues, and the nationally conscious elites developed a deliberate interest in Russian and transferred linguistic devices from Russian into the individual languages in order to support the long-anticipated expansion of functional domains and to strengthen what was perceived as the “Slavonic shape” of the emerging standard language. Though predominantly lexi- cal, some of these devices were grammatical in nature. Such processes must be seen in the context of emerging historical linguistics and Slavonic philology especially. In the paper, we demonstrate the special importance of the close genetic relatedness among languages involved, which make especially grammatical loans morphologically transparent. In this situation, even transfer of highly bound morphemes is possible. In addition to this, this special kind of language transfer is made pos- sible due to the fact that we are facing with intentional language contact between (emerging) standard languages.
2008. The Slavic Word: Suffix Order and Parsability
homepage.univie.ac.at, 2008
In this paper, I test the Parsability Hypothesis (PH) against data from Slavic languages. I demonstrate an intricate relationship between derivation and inflection in the sense that inflectional suffixes serve to identify derivational suffixes but the two types of suffixes differ in respect to further suffixation, and thus suffixes should be distinguished according to their position either in the derivational or inflectional word slot. Based on synchronic and diachronic evidence, I contend that in Slavic languages, parsability holds for inflection, provided that a language stacks suffixes in the inflectional word slot, but not for derivation, though parsability may be used as a supporting criterion for establishing the +/-closing character of a suffix in the derivational word-slot. I show that different stages in the diachronic development of a language exhibit different degrees of parsability, i.e. parsability is not a constant but a tendency. I conclude that in order to account adequately for Slavic word structure, PH requires some revisions: to consider the role of the word-length and assume two different domains of parsability -derivational and inflectional, as well as to allow the same suffix to apply recursively in derivation and to undermine the role of phonotactics in derivational morphology. initial suffixes and do not blur the morpheme boundary via phonological and morphonological alternations. Thus parsability depends on different factors and occurs by gradations, which allows affixes to be ordered hierarchically according to their ability to parse.
Slavic Morphology: Recent Approaches to Classic Problems, Illustrated with Russian
Journal of Slavic Linguistics, 2017
This state-of-the-field article traces some recent trajectories of morphological theory, illustrated via four classic problems of Slavic morphology: vowel-zero alternation , stem consonant mutations, paradigmatic gaps, and animacy-determined accusative syncretism. Using Russian as the primary illustrating data, one theme that emerges is that theories that leverage the distributional properties of the lexicon have made progress against previously intractable aspects of these phenomena, including idiosyncratic lexical distributions, unexpected (non)productivity, and distributions shared by distinct exponents. In turn, the analyses raise new questions.
Uralica Helsingiensia
Veps is a Finnic minority language that has long been influenced by Russian, the prestige language in the speech area. The influence of Russian can be perceived in all subsystems of the Veps language, but hardly any research has been done on its impact on morphology. The current paper focuses on the influence of Russian on the Veps indefinite pronouns and their restructuring. The contemporary Veps indefinite pronoun system is based on the use of different affixes and particles, i.e., indefiniteness markers, which are attached to interrogative stems. This article describes the various Veps indefiniteness markers, which have been acquired via morpheme transfer (MAT) and morphological pattern transfer (PAT) from Russian. The borrowing of indefiniteness markers is typical for languages under the very strong influence of another language. According to contemporary studies, the motivation for borrowing should primarily be attributed to sociolinguistic factors and less to structural-typolo...