(Pseudo-)Anglicisms as Nominal Compounds in Italian

The frequency of (pseudo-)Anglicisms in Italian has steadily increased in the past decades. In Italian, N+N compounds are rare and generally left-headed. Taking a broadly functional-cognitive perspective on the outcomes of contact with English right-headed word formation, the analysis discusses Italian classifying and identifying compounds primarily mediated through the press or coined for use as names and trademarks. The data suggest that English foreign compounding only ever has a reinforcing effect on word formation patterns that are already available to Italian. For example, favouring the spread from learned to non-learned word formation in second-generation neoclassical compounds. Additionally, while the pressure to adapt borrowed compounds from English leads to reductions to simplexes or loan translations, other compounds retain the English order of components. Thus we also find right-headed hybrid analogues and constructs with cognate bases that are formed in Italian by analogy with Anglicisms.

Compound Calques in an Eighteenth-Century German-Lithuanian Dictionary

This chapter presents research on the Lithuanian determinative, possessive, and verbal governing compound calques that were patterned on the German compounds encountered in the manuscript of the 18th c. German-Lithuanian dictionary by Jacob Brodowski from East Prussia (Lithuania Minor). The author distinguishes between absolute compound calques (i.e. item-by-item copies of donor language compounds, including both the pattern of a compound and the semantics of its members) and non-absolute (or creative) compound calques that have differences in the semantics of one member, in the pattern of the compound, or in both. The analysis also encompasses the overall characteristics of the Lithuanian compounds and their German equivalents as well as the integration of compound calques into the word formation system of Lithuanian.

Examining the Integration of Borrowed Nouns in Immigrant Speech: The Case of Canadian Greek

The chapter examines borrowing and integration of nouns in the language spoken by Greek immigrants in Canada, where English is the donor language and Greek the recipient. It deals with the questions whether the typological distance between the English and the Greek, where the former is analytic and the latter fusional is an inhibitor for borrowing and whether the types of integration can be attributed to specific properties of the languages in contact. It argues that phonological, morphological and semantic factors are at work throughout the process of adopting and integrating English nouns, but morphological constraints have the most prominent role. More specifically, it shows the mandatory alignment to the fundamental Greek properties of inflection and gender assignment, which caters for the accommodation of loan nouns in Canadian Greek by assigning them specific gender values, and an unequivocal preference for particular inflection classes, the ones most productively used in Greek. The data are drawn from both written and oral sources, the latter being recorded interviews with spontaneous Greek immigrant speech from the provinces of Québec, Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia.

The Interaction between Borrowing and Word Formation: Evidence from Modern Greek Prefixes

This chapter discusses two cases of Modern Greek prefixes whose extensive use in loan translations from foreign languages reveals a complex interplay between borrowing and word formation. The prefixes υπερ‎- and αντι‎- derive from the Ancient Greek prepositions υπέρ‎ (‘over, beyond’) and αντί‎ (‘in front of, instead of’), respectively, but, in the course of their grammaticalization into prefixes, they have also developed some additional non-locational meanings, e.g. ‘excess’ (υπερ‎-εργασία‎ [ipererγ‎asía] ‘overwork’), ‘against, opposing’ (αντι‎-αμερικανικός‎ [andiamerikanikós] ‘anti-american’). Given the extensive use of Greek prefixes in loan translations, two questions are addressed: How does calquing influence word formation processes in contemporary Greek? And does borrowing affect the meaning of Modern Greek prefixes? It is shown that borrowing constitutes a trigger for the expansion of the domain of use and the development of polysemy in Modern Greek prefixation. Furthermore, it is investigated which factors can account for the prevalence of all these loan translations, as opposed to direct borrowings.

Compounding and Contact

The behaviour of compounds in language contact situations is examined here through the consideration of case studies involving the influence of Greek on English, of Western European languages, especially English, on Russian, of Western European languages, especially French, on Greek, and of French on English. It is shown that in the borrowing of compounds and compounding structures, languages seem not to engage in adaptation to native language patterns, and that once a new structure enters a language via borrowing it takes on a life of its own, so to speak, and can assume forms that are quite different from their form in the source language. The question of simplification versus complexification under conditions of language contact is also treated against the backdrop of compounds and contact.

How an ‘Italian’ Suffix Became Productive in Germanic Languages

In modern West-Germanic and Scandinavian languages one comes across words such as German Nudo(‘nudist’), Swedish fyllo (‘alcoholic’) and Dutch lullo (‘asshole’). All these words are recently coined under the influence of American English words such as psycho, from psychopath, lesbo, from lesbian, and kiddo from kid. This chapter describes how this new pattern of shortened and monosyllabic -o words has spread across the word and how it was able to compete with other shortened, ‘clipped’ words such as English sex from sexual activity, plane from aeroplane, flu from influenza and clipped and monosyllabic forms with a suffix -y/-ie, so called hypocoristics, such as telly from television set, Andy from Andrew and hottie from hot. It also explains how this new Italian-style American English suffix managed to put aside its own Swedish, German and Dutch patterns and how this new -opattern was borrowed and became productive via a process of reinterpretation in these languages.

Borrowed Compounds, Borrowed Compounding – Portuguese Data

Morphological compounding patterns in Portuguese are quite recent. This innovation was triggered by a particular case of language contact, which yielded a peculiar kind of borrowing, both lexical (neoclassical roots) and structural (neoclassical compounding). The introduction of this ‘innovative’ word formation resource may have found a smooth path into Portuguese through the similarity with prefixation, but the key to success was that the same kind of language contact probably took place simultaneously in many European languages. In the case of Portuguese, French (particularly during the 1700s and 1800s) and English (more recently) were the main source languages. The sudden abundance of data that produced a parallel neoclassical lexicon may have increased the pressure that favoured the emergence of root compounding in Portuguese. Beyond the language-specific situation, this case is also relevant for the reassessment of a general theory of borrowing and borrowing typologies (such as Thomason and Kaufman 1988), since it involves pairs of languages (like Ancient Greek and Portuguese) that were never in direct contact, because they existed in different synchronies, and belong to two different branches of the Indo-European family.

Interaction among Borrowing, Inflection and Word Formation in Polish Medieval Latin

The present study discusses classes of words attested in Polish Medieval Latin which might be interpreted both as borrowings (or loan translations) from Old Polish and as products of regular Latin word formation. Starting from the general structural similarity between Polish and Latin as inflectional languages as well as from their phonetic similarity, it emphasizes the role of inflection in lexical transfers from Polish into Latin. The interaction between borrowing and word formation is, in turn, addressed in terms of parallel semantic niches occurring in Old Polish and Polish Medieval Latin. The analysis consists in verifying whether the niches encountered in Polish Medieval Latin are organized according to a lexico-semantic pattern attested in Latin of any period in its history. In addition, by making recourse to Štekauer’s onomasiological theory, the possible interaction between competition and collaboration, as manifested in new coinages in Polish Medieval Latin, is examined.

The Suffixes -ismus and -ita in Nouns in Czech

This chapter documents the interplay between borrowing and word formation on the example of the suffixes -ismus and -ita, which are listed among the most common suffixes in loan nouns in Czech. The suffixes are both used to form abstract nouns but differ in many aspects. The suffix -ismus combines with bases that form larger derivational families than those of -ita but still most nouns in -ita share their root with several other derivatives, too. By analysing selected derivatives and their mutual relations across a large amount of derivational families, the study demonstrates that the size and inner structure of derivational families can provide significant knowledge about the meaning of the formations analysed. The meanings of the suffixes are described by patterns which involve the most relevant derivatives with explicitly marked derivational relations. Using the patterns, it is possible to explain semantic nuances that have not been described with loan words in Czech so far.

The Role of Borrowing in the Derivation of Passive Potential Adjectives in Polish

The chapter deals with the role of the [±native] marking in the formation of deverbal adjectives terminating in the suffix -alny in Polish and attributes the rise in the productivity of the suffix in the past fifty years to the linguistic influence of English. It is argued that the influx and subsequent adaptation of English verbs coupled with the speakers’ awareness that -able and -alny discharge similar roles in their respective systems of word formation has a role to play in raising the productivity of the suffix. A frequency analysis supported by diachronic information conducted on the National Corpus of the Polish Language reveals that the rule produces twice as many hapax legomena in the foreign subdomain. However, the formation of -alny derivatives on borrowed or adapted stems seems to have given a new impulse to the formation of passive potential adjectives based on native bases. This is due to the fact that, counter to what previous analyses concluded, the rule is operative on transitive eventive verbs forming aspectual pairs irrespective of whether they are [±native].