Investigação histórica do sufixo -eir- na nomeação de vegetais em língua portuguesa

A Historical Investigation of the Suffix -eir- for the Naming of Plants in the Portuguese Language. The Latin suffix -ari-, used as a creator of adjectives, developed several meanings during the period of spoken late Latin, as well as in the formation of the Romance languages. One of those meanings, present in the Portuguese suffix -eiro/ -eira, is associated with tree names, based on the name of the corresponding fruit. Quite productive in current modern Portuguese, that suffix was always linked to the denomination of plants in general, some of them not necessarily related to edible fruits or even to fruits. Similarities are found between the Portuguese derivations and other Romance languages. In this text, those similarities were investigated from a historical-comparative point of view. The high convergence in the western Romance languages can be motivated both by a common Latin heritage as by further loanwords, however during the European expansion in the sixteenth century, new plant names were known from the New World and their naming was based on words derived by the same suffix. Keywords: suffixation, Romance linguistics, botanical popular naming, historical morphology, morphological productivity.

Some new insights into the semantics of English N+N compounds

<p>This thesis focuses on English N+N compounds and the primary purpose of the study is to investigate the way in which compounded structures acquire their meaning and to check the way in which the semantics of each of the constituents contributes to the overall meaning of the structure. The way in which such contributions are made should be inferable from the linguistic analysis of the structure and meaning of compounds. In order to do this, the thesis looks first at the morphological productivity of the constituents comprising a compound. The second aim is to identify whether the productivity of a compound constituent on the morphological level coincides with the productivity of the semantic relation realised in the constituent family. The discussion of the results obtained from a corpus study provides plausible explanations for the regularities noted in the course of the analysis by using some of the relevant principles from the complex of approaches including the Construction Grammar and Cognitive Grammar approaches. Examples of compounds were collected from the printed media (NZ broadsheets) and the BNC. The analysis of the data used both quantitative and qualitative methods. The quantitative analysis of the data confirms two hypotheses: (1) that a constituent is more productive in just one of the positions (modifier or head), and (2) the more productive a constituent is, the more likely it is to realise a single semantic relation in a constituent family. The qualitative analysis involves consideration of the semantic content of the concepts in each constituent in order to see how this content is reflected in the semantic relations realised by a constituent. It is discovered that the semantic content of the head is a stronger predictor of the relation realised in a compound than that of the modifier. The study is important in order to better understand the factors that govern the formation of compounds and the patterns that speakers use in the process of coining complex lexical items ...</p>

Some new insights into the semantics of English N+N compounds

<p>This thesis focuses on English N+N compounds and the primary purpose of the study is to investigate the way in which compounded structures acquire their meaning and to check the way in which the semantics of each of the constituents contributes to the overall meaning of the structure. The way in which such contributions are made should be inferable from the linguistic analysis of the structure and meaning of compounds. In order to do this, the thesis looks first at the morphological productivity of the constituents comprising a compound. The second aim is to identify whether the productivity of a compound constituent on the morphological level coincides with the productivity of the semantic relation realised in the constituent family. The discussion of the results obtained from a corpus study provides plausible explanations for the regularities noted in the course of the analysis by using some of the relevant principles from the complex of approaches including the Construction Grammar and Cognitive Grammar approaches. Examples of compounds were collected from the printed media (NZ broadsheets) and the BNC. The analysis of the data used both quantitative and qualitative methods. The quantitative analysis of the data confirms two hypotheses: (1) that a constituent is more productive in just one of the positions (modifier or head), and (2) the more productive a constituent is, the more likely it is to realise a single semantic relation in a constituent family. The qualitative analysis involves consideration of the semantic content of the concepts in each constituent in order to see how this content is reflected in the semantic relations realised by a constituent. It is discovered that the semantic content of the head is a stronger predictor of the relation realised in a compound than that of the modifier. The study is important in order to better understand the factors that govern the formation of compounds and the patterns that speakers use in the process of coining complex lexical items ...</p>

Comparing the productivity of Estonian deverbal suffixes -mine, -us, and -ja in five registers: A quantitative usage-based approach

This article provides an empirical, usage-based account of the different aspects of morphological productivity of three Estonian deverbal suffixes: -mine, -us, and -ja, in five different registers. The fundamental quantitative measures developed by Baayen (1989, 1992, 1993) and his colleagues are applied to relatively small corpus samples in order to test how well these measures conform to the linguist’s intuition about the productivity of the derivation patterns under different communicative settings. The results suggest that while the sample size does affect the reliability of the results, the measures prove a useful approximation of productivity in different registers, even for samples with low token counts. Kokkuvõte. Maarja-Liisa Pilvik: Eesti keele deverbaalsufiksite -mine, -us ja -ja produktiivsuse võrdlus viies registris: kvantitatiivne kasutuspõhine lähenemine. Artikkel annab empiirilise, kasutuspõhise ülevaate kolme eesti keele deverbaalsufiksi – -mine, -us ja -ja – produktiivsusest viies eesti keele registris. Produktiivsuse eri aspekte näitlikustavad kvantitatiivsed mõõdikud (Baayen 1989, 1992, 1993), mis on leidnud morfoloogilise produktiivsuse uurimustes laialdast kasutust. Analüüsi tulemused näitavad, et selleks uurimuses kasutatud valimi võrdlemisi väike maht mõjutab mõnevõrra mõõdikute tõlgendamist ning nende usaldusväärsust. Samas haakuvad kvantitatiivse analüüsi tulemused hästi keeleteadlase intuitsiooniga ning kasutatud morfoloogilise produktiivsuse mõõdikud võivad seega olla eri registrite empiiriliseks võrdlemiseks kasulikud isegi siis, kui valimid on korpuslingvistilises mõistes väikesed.

Morfio – A Corpus-Based Perspective on Latvian Morphology

Our paper introduces Morfio, a corpus-based online tool for the study of derivation and morphological productivity. Originally, Morfio was created for Czech, in this paper, however, we would like to introduce its Latvian implementation. Apart from the tool description, we want to showcase its possibilities for describing Latvian morphology by way of several examples.

Quantitative approaches to productivity and borrowing in Maltese derivation

This paper applies quantitative measures of productivity to a selection of Maltese derivational affixes borrowed from Italian/Sicilian. The productivity rankings of the selected affixes are compared to their Italian sources revealing identical rankings for the most productive affixes and slightly deviating rankings for the less productive affixes. It is argued that morphological productivity scores and the subsequent rankings form a pattern that is established in the recipient language by the sum of matter borrowings of formations involving the respective affixes. In conjunction with a discussion of the mixed lexicon and morphology of Maltese, a case is made that converging or diverging productivity rankings can be explained by well-studied variables in language contact studies: intensity of contact, availability of registers/repertoires, and route of borrowing (direct/indirect). In addition it is shown that the cross-linguistic application of other quantitative measures, including a newly proposed Integration Factor and Seifart’s criteria for direct and indirect borrowing, can help uncover where the distributions of donor and recipient language affixes diverge, providing an exploratory tool for morphologist and contact linguists alike.

The salience of local schemas in a productive word-formation process

Word-formation rules of a generative type are insufficient to describe a mechanism which appears to be productive, on the one hand, but is also irregular in its productivity, on the other. Cognitive morphological accounts have stressed the importance of a wide range of more and less detailed schemas (rather than rules), sanctioning different kinds of novel formations. This article addresses the issue of morphological productivity in the context of the formation of abstract deverbal action nouns, also known as Nomina Actionis, with names of political states as derivational bases. The very number and variety of relevant lexicalized nominalizations as well as hapax legomena is impressive, which makes the phenomenon look productive. The data obtained from COCA and specialist literature show interesting tendencies and gaps in the system. Numerous nominalizations are motivated semantically and pragmatically and are sanctioned by local schemas.