Data di Pubblicazione:
2016
Citazione:
From inflection to derivation: outcomes of Early Romani genitive in Piedmontese Sinti / G. Meli. - In: SKASE JOURNAL OF THEORETICAL LINGUISTICS. - ISSN 1336-782X. - 13:3(2016), pp. 29-45.
Abstract:
Genitive in Early Romani involved three morphemes: a first one, called Layer I, marking oblique case, gender and number of the inflected noun, a second one, known as Layer II, marking genitive case, and a third one marking obligatory agreement in gender, number and case with its head. This structure gave the genitive a morpho- syntactic status between noun and adjective. In Piedmont and France Piedmontese Sinti we find some derivatives originating from these genitive forms, es. France Piedmont Sinti tudéskero, pl. tudéskere ‘milkman’, from tud ‘milk’. In both varieties, the word formation process creates a word whose meaning is ‘the one of x’, es. the milkman is ‘the one of the milk’. These derivatives are the outcome of a change that led an inflectional morphemic sequence to become a derivational morpheme. The change has two different outcomes in the two varieties. In both, Layer I and II have been reanalysed in a single morpheme carrying derivational meaning, but, while in France Piedmontese Sinti, the paradigm is formed by the sequence –esker- ‘derivational morpheme’ + ‘number/inherent gender morpheme’ (es. tud-esker-o, pl. tud-esker-e) and a productive derivational pattern, namely [[x]N -esker-]N ‘the one of x’ can be observed, in Piedmont Piedmontese Sinti we find a conservative paradigm in which the derivational morpheme still shows agreement in gender and number with the source noun, and an innovative paradigm in which this agreement is reduced to the number. The changes giving rise to these derivatives could be an instance of degrammaticalization: in conjunction with the obsolescence of nominal case marking, some genitives, probably in their adjectival function, remained in the language and were gradually reanalysed as derivatives. The instances seem to concord with some aspects of Norde’s description of deinflectionalization, and, in this framework, paradigmaticity appears to be the parameter that better highlights the differences between the derivational processes in the two varieties.
Tipologia IRIS:
01 - Articolo su periodico
Keywords:
language change; Romani; morphology; genitive; degrammaticalization
Elenco autori:
G. Meli
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