Back-formation and conversion in the historical grammar of Basque
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7172945 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Julen Manterola (0000-0002-2381-183X, University of the Basque Country, corresponding author), José Ignacio Hualde (0000-0003-4969-2995, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 18 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 215-238 |
| Publication date | 2025-11-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | WORD Structure (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1750-1245 • E-ISSN: 1755-2036 |
| Publisher | Edinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.3366/word.2025.0255 |
| OpenAlex | W4416122312 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 6 |
The role played by back-formation processes in the creation of new Basque words is understudied. This paper confirms that back-formation has been a productive means of word-formation in Basque, by gathering examples from both older scholarship and recent studies. Basque has a productive morphological rule for deriving verbs from nouns and adjectives, as in handi ‘big’/ handi(tu) ‘become big’. In some cases, however, a noun or adjective has arguably been created from a verb by back-formation instead. In this paper, we provide several criteria for identifying instances of back-formation. We start with loanwords, where the facts are clearer than in the native vocabulary. We also discuss instances where both a verb and a related noun were borrowed (e.g., bainu ‘bath’/ baina(tu) ‘bathe’) and the existence of such pairs has served as an analogical model for new deverbal nouns
Adjective · Grammar · Historical linguistics · Noun · Scholarship · Verb · Word formation · Basque language and culture studies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
| Highly cited | No |
|---|