Volume 69, Issue 4 - Special Issue: Word-formation. Language contact, language contrast and language comparison, Issue Editors: Marcus Callies and Christel Stolz

This article explores the hypothesis that bilingual knowledge of different compounding patterns can influence the interpretation of a set of novel English noun-noun compounds. The focus of the study is on bilingual speakers who are fluent in two typologically diverse languages: te reo Māori (postmodifying) and English (premodifying). A comparison of bilingual and monolingual participant groups indicates that Māori-English bilingual speakers more frequently rely on the Māori structure of left-headed compounding in their meaning interpretation of English compounds. The implications of these results are discussed in terms of the cognitive process of transfer and additional means of meaning association in bilingual speakers.

This paper investigates a new type of formative in English that frequently gives rise to a productive word-formation process. Three questions that have been discussed controversially in previous research will be addressed: What is the origin of these formatives? What type of morpheme do they represent? What type of word-formation process are they involved in? The paper argues that the secretion, productive use and subsequent lexicalization of these formatives is a recent development in English word-formation that presents challenges to morphological theory and grammaticalization. In addition, data from other languages suggest that processes of language contact are related to the emergence of this new formative in languages other than English.

This paper examines the correlation between word order and affixation as put forward in Greenberg’s Universal 27 (1966) for the case of English derivational morphology. A change in word order from OV to VO took place in the Old English period. I hypothesize that the change in syntax is reflected to a certain degree in the derivational morphology of Present Day English. Data from the Penn-Parsed Corpora of Historical English reveal a change in the ratio of prefix and suffix types that hint at a possible syntactic impact on morphology. However, these data of affix types are the first findings of ongoing research that only give us a preliminary view of a possible underlying mechanism. Provided that a correlation does not account for the cause, compounds as a carrier of syntactic information to the word level are discussed as an explanation.

This paper assesses the productivity of adverbial derivation with { -ment } in Maltese with regard to its source { -mente } in Italian. In addition to a comparison of formation rules and restrictions in both languages, a traditional measure of productivity, Baayen ’ s P, is compared between Italian and Maltese, using a variable corpus approach suited for further cross-linguistic application.

This paper compares the role played by suppletion and a selection of other morphological form-function mismatches in the paradigms of ordinal numerals in the languages of Europe and Mesoamerica. The focus is on identifying the similarities and dissimilarities of those properties which are typical of the two (macro-)regions. The paradigmatic relations of ordinals are looked at in horizontal and vertical perspective. It is argued that suppletive first is a cross-linguistically autonomous phenomenon whereas suppletive second marks an areal preference of a sizable group of languages in Europe. In addition to proper suppletion of stems, there are also combinations of suppletion and derivation. Furthermore, it is shown that in the absence of stem suppletion, certain ordinals of a paradigm may reflect construction types which differ from that of the bulk of the other members of the same paradigm and thus contribute to the heterogeneity of the paradigm.