DEVERBAL NOUN-FORMING SUFFIXES EXPRESSING THE RESULT OF AN ACTION OR PROCESS

• Authors: H-Varga Marta
• Languages of publication: HU

Abstracts

EN

Deverbal noun-forming derivational suffixes exhibit polysemy in general and it is conspicuous that their major and minor functions (primary and secondary meanings) may be intermixed. The authoress surveys the suffixes having the major or minor meaning 'result of an action or process'. An overwhelming majority of suffixes having 'nomen acti' as their major meaning are no longer productive in present-day Hungarian and the derivatives involving them have a rather low frequency of occurrence. The only exceptions are -At, -mÁny, and -vÁny. Although they can hardly be claimed to be productive, either, existing derived nouns involving them still occur frequently. - The paper specifically discusses the semantics of -Ás, a suffix whose minor (secondary) function is to express 'result of an action or process', trying to find out how, in addition to its more general 'nomen actionis' major function, this suffix may have acquired this secondary meaning, as well as what phonological constraints may prevent the suffix -At (whose primary meaning is exactly 'result of an action or process') from occurring in these cases. - Synonymous suffixes expressing 'result of an action or process' do not in general form sets of nouns of identical meaning, partly because this would be superfluous, and partly due to 'lexical blocking'. However, the latter principle is not necessarily observed in all cases. Parallel derivations (that is, cases where several suffixes of more or less the same function can be attached to the same base) sometimes do occur even where there are no striking semantic differences between members of such sets of derivatives - that is, when the resulting forms are synonyms or near-synonyms. However, it can be observed that such parallel derivatives tend to undergo semantic differentiation over time.

Keywords

EN

DERIVATIONAL SUFFIXES; DEVERBAL NOUN-FORMING

Discipline

• PHILOLOGY_&_LINGUISTICS: PHILOLOGY & LINGUISTICS

• Publisher: Society of Hungarian Linguistics
• Journal: Magyar Nyelv (Hungarian Language)
• Year: 2008
• Volume: 104
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 65-74
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

H-Varga Marta

• Marta H-Varga, for postal address contact the journal editor; www.c3.hu/~magyarnyelv/

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

10HUAAAA07165