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. Asbury , Anna , Berit Gehrke and Veronika Hegedus . 2006 . One size fits all: Prefixes, particles, adpositions and cases as members of the category . In C. Keskin (ed.) UiL OTS Yearbook 2006 . Utrecht : Utrecht University . 1 – 17
“Prefix” is a traditional descriptive notion referring to non-intrusive affixation which adds affixes to the margins of a lexical base. A prefix is an affix which is bound before the base. 3 Prefixes are flexive or derivative morphemes which are
Exploring the meaning and productivity of a polysemous prefix
The case of the Modern Greek prepositional prefix para-
References Amiot, Dany . 2004 . Haut degré et préfixation . In F. Lefeuvre and M. Noailly (eds.) Intesité, Comparaison, Degré. Travaux linguistiques du
A variety of explanations have been offered for the observed cross-linguistic preponderance of suffixes over prefixes. Many are couched in terms of synchronic advantages, such as the cognitive simplicity of cross-category harmony between syntax and morphology, and preferences for processing the lexical meaning in stems before the grammatical material in affixes. But hypotheses about functional advantages cannot constitute explanations in themselves without accounts of the mechanisms by which the advantages are translated into grammatical structure. Here it is shown that the numerous exceptions to such hypotheses can be explained when the individual histories of the affixes are considered, including both their sources and the steps by which they develop.
on the compositional contribution of Czech prefixes on the telicity of degree achievements. By way of example, consider (1) with the degree achievement cool with two possible interpretations as witnessed by the standard test of adverbial
In Old English, as in modern Dutch and German, there were a series of prefixes which were unstressed and phonologically constrained; some of them, because they determined the word-class of the derivatives they formed, were typologically unusual. If we trace these prefixes through into modern English, we find that they have lost ground. Partly they have been replaced by corresponding learned prefixes, partly they have simply become marginalised in the system of English. At the same time, if we look at those prefix-like items which are most productive today, we see that they carry their own stress, are phonologically unconstrained, and many of them are semantically much more lexeme-like. We can interpret these observations as a shift from a largely compounding Germanic basis through a long period of English history where prefixes were a norm, and with signs now starting to appear that a return to a more compound-oriented stage of the language is under way. In retrospect, we have no difficulty in explaining the various shifts of type that have occurred. What is interesting is the method by which the compound-orientation is being re-established, and the possible effect of typological pressures on such a shift. The more compound-oriented modern stage is being achieved not through any simple change, but through a conspiracy of different changes which have the combined effect of leaving erstwhile prefixal elements looking more like lexemes. The changes can be seen as being influenced by the pressures which give rise to the so-called suffixing preference across languages: replacing prefixes with lexemes increases the number of items to be recognised by the listener, but allows maximal use of word-initial cues.
This article explores the morphological nature of what are traditionally called spatial prefixes in the East Caucasian language Dargi. Having developed historically from adverbs, the prefixes are now completely integrated into the verb's morphology, syntax and semantics. Instead of regarding verbs derived with these spatial prefixes as prefixed stems on a synchronic level as well, the alternative proposed here is to consider them bipartite stems. This also fits a recent proposal to regard bipartite stems as a feature of the East Caucasian language family as a whole.
The quantitative approach to morphological productivity developed by Baayen and collaborators is crucially based on the count of hapax legomena in a given, very large textual corpus. In this paper, Baayen's main idea is applied to the little explored domain of Italian prefixation, on the basis of a 75,000,000-token newspaper corpus, and a significant improvement of his procedure is proposed by calculating productivity values at equal token numbers for different affixes. Consequently, variably-sized subcorpora must be sampled to compare affixes displaying different token frequencies. Following this approach, the Italian productive prefixes ri- and in- can be ranked by productivity within their respective derivational domains, and the impact of different derivational cycles on the measure of productivity can be dealt with satisfactorily.
The paper sets out with an overview of preverbs and prefixes in the Uralic languages. It will be shown that most Uralic languages have separable preverbs and only a few have verbal prefixes. These verbal prefixes have been borrowed from Slavic. This means that preverbs never get morphologized in Uralic. We will informally call 'cohesion' the various positions of the preverb relative to the verb. The highest degree of cohesion is the case when the preverb is a genuine prefix; the next degree is represented by adverbial-like preverbs, which obligatorily occupy a preverbal position, and which form a kind of compound with the verb; a yet lower degree is shown by preverbs which can occupy both a preverbal and a postverbal position and some other elements can intervene between the preverb and the base verb; cohesion is greater if only clitical elements can occur between the preverb and the verb. The next stage is represented by the language in which in addition to clitics also some complements can occur in this position. Finally, cohesion is least strong in cases when practically any element can occur between the preverb and the verb. Cohesion should not be confounded with grammaticalization which plays an important role in the development of aspectual and aktionsart-meanings. In this case it can be shown for Hungarian that the development goes through the stages 'adverbial meaning ≯ adverbial meaning and aspectual meaning ≯ aspectual meaning ≯ aspectual meaning and aktionsart-meaning' for the old layer of preverbs and through the stages 'adverbial meaning ≯ adverbial meaning and aspectual meaning ≯ aspectual meaning and aktionsart-meaning' for more recent preverbs. In other words, preverbs may end up by having an aspectual and an aktionsart-meaning' but, as Hungarian shows, not all preverbs have reached this stage.
In Early and Classical Latin, we encounter a rich and complex system in which prefixes are used to render verbs telic and to emphasise the beginning or end of a process or of an activity, and in which the opposition between non-dynamicity and dynamicity or between transitivity and intransitivity is expressed by various suffixes. In the perfect there is an opposition between non-dynamic unprefixed verbs and dynamic prefixed ones. In the later centuries this system breaks down, and there is a blurring of the semantic difference between the prefixed and unprefixed verbs and often also of that between the prefixes themselves. New verbs are formed to replace old verbs that have lost their old functions. These changes pervade the whole verbal system in Latin and affect the semantic relationship between the perfect and imperfect tenses. In Romance, the definite and indefinite articles express the functions previously expressed by the various actional forms.
