[Lingtyp] agent nominalization

[Raffaele Simone]

Dear Eitan,

in addition to the ones mentioned by Giorgio Arcodia, Italian has a typical suffix indicating not only an agent, but particularly an agent specializing in poor or mean activities. 
It is the suffix –ino, with a verb-basis.
Examples:
  1.. spazz-ino “street-sweeper” (spazzare ‘sweep’) 
  2.. imbianch-ino “wall painter” (imbiancare ‘paint [a wall] in white’) 
  3.. portant-ino “stretcher porter” (portare ‘take, bring’) 
  4.. traffich-ino “shady dealer” (trafficare ‘deal’ [here, in a derogatory sense]).
etc. 
The suffix is not exclusive for agents, but also works as a general purpose diminutive. One may suppose that the relative “insignificance” of the job justifies a diminutive to express it. If agentive, –ino is not productive in current Italian.
    Best,

    Raffaele

=================
Università Roma Tre
via Ostiense 236
I-00146 Roma
=================
Attività e pubblicazioni // Activity and publications
http://uniroma3.academia.edu/RaffaeleSimone
@raffaelesimone
Volumi recenti//Recent books: a. Nuovi fondamenti di linguistica, McGraw-Hill Italia, Milano 2014
b. (con//with Francesca Masini, eds.) Word Classes. John Benjamins, Amsterdam & Philadelphia 2014
hn Benjamins, Amsterdam & Philadelphia 2014
c. Come la democrazia fallisce, Garzanti, Milano 2015.

From: Eitan Grossman 
Sent: Wednesday, January 6, 2016 11:07 AM
To: LINGTYP 
Subject: [Lingtyp] agent nominalization

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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