Scholarly record

ON THE PRODUCTIVITY OF THE PROTOTYPICAL VERB TO NOUN ZERO DERIVATION IN MACEDONIAN

Marjana Vaneva

Abstract

In Macedonian, the process of zero derivation is prototypical, inflectional or marginal depending on the presence or absence of changes in the corresponding lexemes, respectively. In the prototypical type of the process, which is subject of this research, when nothing changes in the source and in the target lexeme and, in morphological terms, they are absolutely identical, of all directions; the most productive one is the zero derivation of nouns from verbs. This is due to the fact that Macedonian is a ‘verbal’ language, that is, the verbs have been first formed, and nouns can be easily zero derived from them. In the paper, this kind of change is analysed as prototypical, because there is formal overlapping of the lexemes and there are no inflectional modifications. Hence, the typical characteristics of this word formation process are portrayed in the verb to noun direction: from the source lexeme – the verb, another lexeme – a noun is created with absolutely the same form; slightly changed, expanded meaning achieved with cognitive transfer and metaphorical association; and which belongs to a completely different lexical category, due to the different function and position of the newly created, zero derived lexeme. This direction encompasses several subtypes in itself, depending on the deeper meaning of the target lexeme – the noun. Apart from being productive, the process is also a fairly new, economical way of forming new words in Macedonian.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/SGEMSOCIAL2015/B12/S3.090

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