Borrowed Affixes And Morphological Productivity: A Case Study Of Two Maltese Nominalisations
Year: 2018
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Among the derivational processes that have been adopted into Maltese based on the Romance model, there are processes to derive nouns from verbs which are relatively recent developments. Examples include the use of the suffix -Vr (e.g., spara/sparar ‘shoot’/‘(the) shooting’), and the use of -(z)zjoni (e.g., spjega / sp- jegazzjoni ‘explain’/‘explanantion’). This paper discusses these processes in the context of Maltese derivation in general. After a brief theoretical exposition and an overview of Maltes derivation, we present a corpus-based analysis of the pro- ductivity of -Vr and -(z)zjoni derivations, followed by an analysis of the evidence for indirect borrowing in these two cases, based on the work of Seifart (2015). We show that, while there is evidence that both are productive, the statistical evidence suggests that -Vr processes are more likely to result in novel forms. By the same to- ken, -Vr nominalisations more clearly represent cases of indirect borrowing, as ev- idenced by the greater number of types which have corresponding simplex forms, and by the greater probability that the simplex forms are more frequent than the nominalisations.
Source: Language Science Press eBooks
Authors: Gatt, Albert, Fabri, Ray
Institution: University of Malta
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2919829794