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Article published In: Languages in Contrast
Vol. 21:1 (2021) ► pp.138–161

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Denominal verb formation in English and Modern Greek

 | F.R.S.-FNRS | Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium
Published online: 18 August 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.19020.kou
Abstract
Cross-linguistically, there are different patterns for denominal verb formation and languages show preferences for certain patterns (cf. McIntyre, A. 2015. Denominal Verbs. In Word Formation: An International Handbook of the Languages of Europe (Volume II), P. Müller, I. Ohnheiser, S. Olsen and F. Rainer (eds), 1406–1424. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). In this paper, I focus on denominal verb formation in English and Modern Greek. The analyzed data come from the TenTen corpora (Sketch Engine, Kilgariff, A., Baisa, V., Bušta, J., Jakubíček, M., Kovář, V., Michelfeit, J., Rychlý, P. and Suchomel, V. 2014. The Sketch Engine: Ten Years On. Lexicography 1(1): 7–36. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The first aim is to quantify the use of the patterns of denominal verb formations in both languages. The results of the analysis corroborate the findings of previous analyses, such as the strong preference for conversion for denominal verb formation in English and for suffixation in Modern Greek. However, the present paper aims to go a step further. The second aim is to discuss why English and Modern Greek show these preferences. I propose that the preferences can be explained if we correlate the parameters of inflectional marking, word order/configurationality, system of lexical category assignment and boundary permeability.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Denominal verb formation: Contrastive descriptionof the formal patterns
    • 2.1Affixational processes
      • 2.1.1English
      • 2.1.2Modern Greek
    • 2.2Conversion
      • 2.2.1English
      • 2.2.2Modern Greek
    • 2.3Contrastive summary
  • 3.Data and methodology
    • 3.1Corpora used and data extraction
    • 3.2Selection criteria for the analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1English
    • 4.2Modern Greek
    • 4.3Contrastive analysis
  • 5.Discussion: Motivating the contrasts
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Primary sources
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