[Lingtyp] agent nominalization

Thu Jan 7 11:17:00 UTC 2016

Giorgio Arcodia has written :
<<Dear Eitan,

As to my native Italian, the first two 
agentive  morphemes that come to my mind are -tore (< Latin -tor) and -aio /  -aro (< Latin -arius). I wouldn't know where the Latin forms come  from, but it might be an easy question for a specialist.>>
         If Ital. –aio/-aro, –aia/-ara  have a clear etymological source in Lat. –arius/-aria, the etymon of the Lat. suffix remains completely obscure (case b. in Eitan’s list : when we arrive at the protolanguage the grams/morphemes   remain mysterious: ‘arbitraire du signe’! ) A quite different case is quoted in La Polla’s answer: “In Rawang there is an agentive nominaliser, -shu, derived historically from a general third person form found in many Tibeto-Burman languages.” See also what he adds, referring to Guillaume: “there are also agentive nominalisations from the use of a word for ‘person’ ”. 

Best,
Paolo

Prof.Paolo Ramat
Academia Europaea

From: Doris Payne 
Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2016 6:23 PM
To: 'Eitan Grossman' ; 'LINGTYP' 
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] agent nominalization

You may find the following paper of interest. The paper lists quite a number of nominalizers in this Eastern Nilotic language, but especially explores the patterning of two nominalizers relative to semantic role versus animacy, and lexical aspect of the verb roots involved. (Un)known and/or speculated-on diachronic sources are also listed.

Payne, Doris L. and Derek Olsen. 2009. Maa (Maasai) Nominalization: Animacy, Agentivity and Instrument.

In Selected Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, ed. Masangu Matondo, Fiona

Mc Laughlin, and Eric Potsdam, 151-165. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. www.lingref.com, document #2143

http://www.lingref.com/cpp/acal/38/paper2143.pdf 

-          Doris

_______________________

Doris L. Payne

Professor of Linguistics

Interim Director, African Studies

University of Oregon

Eugene, Oregon  97403

541-346-3894

From: Lingtyp [mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org] On Behalf Of Eitan Grossman
Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2016 2:07 AM
To: LINGTYP <LINGTYP at listserv.linguistlist.org>
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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