[Lingtyp] agent nominalization

[Eitan Grossman]

Thanks Marcel!

Actually, the borrowing of agent nominalizers doesn't seem to be very rare,
if one looks at Frank Seifart's Affix Borrowing database:

http://afbo.info/parameters/20#2/35.6/18.0

Of course, borrowing is one way for a nominalizer to enter a language, but
I'm interested in other pathways of development, whether via
grammaticalization (tricky as it is in this case) or reanalysis of
something else.

Best,
Eitan


Eitan Grossman
Lecturer, Department of Linguistics/School of Language Sciences
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Tel: +972 2 588 3809
Fax: +972 2 588 1224

On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 1:14 PM, Marcel Erdal <merdal4 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Eitan,
> Practically all Turkic languages have been forming agent nominalizers by
> adding -či to various verbal nouns. Agentive -či appears to have been so
> 'attractive' that most contact languages between Manchuria and the Adriatic borrowed
> it, prehistorically and till the 1900s.
> Marcel
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On 06.01.2016, at 12:07, Eitan Grossman <eitan.grossman at mail.huji.ac.il>
> wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
> I am writing to ask a question about 'agent'* nominalizations across
> languages. I am interested in agent nominalizers that do or don't have
> known diachronic sources, in the attempt to understand which diachronic
> pathways are attested (and hopefully, their relative frequency/rarity). For
> example, some languages have:
>
> (a) bound morphemes whose diachronic source is clearly identifiable,
> whether lexical (Japanese -nin or -sya 'person; Khwe and Meskwaki are
> similar, or Japanese -te 'hand') or grammatical (Serbo-Croatian -l(o) from
> an original instrumental meaning, perhaps similarly for Afroasiatic m-).
> (b) bound morphemes whose diachronic source may be mysterious or
> reconstructible as such to the proto-language (Quechuan -q?,
> Malay-Indonesian peng-/pe-?).
> (c) free morphemes whose diachronic source is clearly identifiable
> (Ponoapean olen ''man of')
> (d) more complex constructions involving the reduction of modifier clauses
> of some sort (Coptic ref- < ultimately from 'person who verbs')
> (e) rarer morphosyntactic alternations, like reduplication of the initial
> syllable (Hadze, Serer), vowel length (Akan), vowel raising (+breathiness)
> (Nuer)
> (f) no such nominalizer mentioned, or explicitly mentioned that there is
> no dedicated agent noun construction. In some languages, ad hoc formation
> via relatives is the only (Tlapanec), main, or a supplementary strategy
> (e.g., Indonesian relativizer yang).
> (g) zero conversion
>
> There is nice paper by Luschuetzky & Rainer in STUF 2011, but it deals
> almost exclusively with affixes and only rarely mentions diachronic
> information.
>
> From a *very* preliminary survey of grammars, it looks like the origin of
> agent nominalizers is often pretty obscure, and the shortest and most bound
> morphemes look to be very old, quite expectedly. Identifiable lexical
> sources seem to converge around 'person, thing' or body parts. Reduction of
> complex constructions to an affix seems to be rare but attested.
>
> *So, here's the question: in your languages, is the diachronic source of
> agent nominalizers identifiable? * I'd be grateful for any information
> you might be willing to share!
>
> Best,
> Eitan
>
> *Disclaimer: even though this is a common term, most languages I've seen
> don't single out the semantic role of agent, and this is often noted in
> theoretical discussions. Also, such nominalizations don't have to be
> derivational or even 'morphological.'
>
>
>
> Eitan Grossman
> Lecturer, Department of Linguistics/School of Language Sciences
> Hebrew University of Jerusalem
> Tel: +972 2 588 3809
> Fax: +972 2 588 1224
>
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