affix pleonasm crosslinguistically

[Nobukatsu Minoura]

Dear Francesco,

Malagasy has following examples:

(1) m-i-lomano 'swim'
     AV.PRES-VM-swim

In (1) -om- in the stem lomano is an obsolete actor voice (active voice) infix.
In the present days, the infix is no longer meaningful nor productive.
Instead you need a actor voice (active voice) and present tense prefix m-
plus a valency prefix like i- to make a verbal stem into an actor voice (active
voice) form.

(2) m-i-homehy 'laugh'
     AV.PRES-VM-laugh

(2) has the same obsolete infix -om-.

(3) m-i-hinana 'eat'
     AV.PRES-VM-eat

(3) has an obsolete patient voice (passive voice) infix -in- for some reason,
but it is an actor voice (active voice) form.  The present-day patient voice
(passive voice) form is han-ina (eat-PV).

The following idiomatic expression seems to use a seemingly actor voice
(active voice) form without the prefixes but only with the obsolete infix.

(4) m-a-zoto-a h<-om->ana 'bonne appetit, lit. be diligent to eat'
     AV.PRES-VM-be.diligent-IMPER eat<-AV->eat

But you cannot use the form homana as the main verb.
You need to use mihinana (3) instead.

Best wishes,

Nobukatsu Minoura
Assoc. Professor
Institute of Global Studies
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
minoura at tufs.ac.jp

2014/03/25 19:37、Gardani, Francesco <Francesco.Gardani at WU.AC.AT> のメール：

> Dear colleagues,
>  
> Some time ago I wrote a paper on affix pleonasm in the languages of Europe, covering instances such as the following ones:
> (1) dialectal English musician-er formusician;
>  
> (2) Latin etern-al(-is) ‘eternal’ instead ofetern(-us) (-al realizes the wordclass ‘adjective’ more explicitly);
>  
> (3) Yucatec Maya alcanzar-t-ik [achieve-TRR-INCMPL] (the transitivizing suffix -t applies to loanverbs that in the source language are already transitive, in our case Spanish alcanzar ‘to reach’).
> For more examples, please find enclosed in this email the following overview paper: Gardani, Francesco. (2015 estimated). Affix pleonasm. In Peter Müller, Ingeborg Ohnheiser, Susan Olsen & Franz Rainer (eds), Word Formation in the European languages. Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science. Berlin: de Gruyter.
>  
> What I want to do now is to expand the database beyond the languages of Europe. To this end, I would kindly ask for your help. If you know of any instances of affix pleonasm (or you think they could be such), I would appreciate it a lot if you'd share your data (possibly also the references) with me.
>  
> Thank you in advance for your help and best regards
>  
> Francesco Gardani
> <hsk-art.32-gardani.pdf>

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