affix pleonasm crosslinguistically

[Tasaku Tsunoda]

Dear Franceso,

    In addition to my posting of 2 April (08:33, Japanese time), I should
add the following.

    In the Warrongo language of northeast Australia, nouns generally do not
make a number distinction. For example bama can mean 'a man' and 'men'.
    However, there is at least one exception.
    The noun galbin seems to mean 'a child' and 'children'.
    In addition, we have galbiri 'children'. This word seems to imply 'many
children'.

    In this context, the paragraph from pp. 230-231 of the following book is
relevant.

Tsunoda, Tasaku, 2011. A grammar of Warrongo. (Mouton Grammar Library 43).
Berlin and New York: De Gruyter Mouton.

    The paragraph is cited below.

============================================================================
=================
In Warrongo, the only unequivocal plural form of any noun is galbiri
‘children’. In Japanese, nouns generally do not make a number distinction,
e.g. gakusee ‘a student, students’. But the suffix -domo or the suffix
-tati, both ‘plural’, can be added to nouns with human referents, e.g.
gakusee-domo and gakusee-tati ‘student-plural’, i.e. ‘students’. Now,
compare ko ‘a child, children’, ko-domo ‘a child, children’, and
ko-domo-tati ‘children’ (not ‘a child’). This suggests that -domo in ko-domo
‘a child, children’ no longer functions as a plural affix, and another
plural suffix (-tati) is added to mark plurality. That is, etymologically
ko-domo-tati ‘children’ contains two plural suffixes. No doubt the double
plural-marking in child-r-en of English followed the same process. All these
suggest the following possibility: if a given language has nouns with plural
marking, they will include the noun that refers to ‘child’. And if a given
language has nouns with double plural-marking, they will include the noun
that refers to ‘child’.
============================================================================
=================


-- 
Tasaku Tsunoda

From:  "Gardani, Francesco" <Francesco.Gardani at WU.AC.AT>
Reply-To:  "Gardani, Francesco" <Francesco.Gardani at WU.AC.AT>
Date:  2014年3月25日火曜日 19:37
To:  <LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
Subject:  affix pleonasm crosslinguistically

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 for musician;
 
(2) Latin etern-al(-is) ‘eternal’ instead of etern(-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


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