Cover not available
Article published In:
Languages in Contrast
Vol. 21:1 (2021) ► pp.138–161

Denominal verb formation in English and Modern Greek

| F.R.S.-FNRS | Université catholique de Louvain , Belgium
Cross-linguistically, there are different patterns for denominal verb formation and languages show preferences for certain patterns (cf. McIntyre, 2015). 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 et al., 2014). 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.
Keywords: denominals, affixation, conversion, inflection, English/Modern Greek
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
Published online: 18 August 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.19020.kou
References (57)
References
Aronoff, M. 1976. Word Formation in Generative Grammar. Massachusetts: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Bauer, L., Lieber, R. and Plag, I. 2013. The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bauer, L. and Valera, S. (eds). 2005. Approaches to Conversion and/or zero-derivation. Münster: Waxmann.Google Scholar
Berg, T. 2014. Boundary Permeability: A Parameter for Linguistic Typology. Linguistic Typology, 18(3): 489–531. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bisetto, A. and Melloni, C. 2008. Parasynthetic Compounding. Rivista Lingue e Linguaggio 21: 233–260.Google Scholar
Bram, B. 2011. Major Total Conversion in English: The Question of Directionality. PhD Thesis, Victoria University of Wellington.Google Scholar
Charitonidis, C. 2005. Verb Derivation in Modern Greek: Alternation Classes, Conceptual Structures, Semantic Fields. Frankfurt am Main: PeterLang.Google Scholar
2011. Making Verbs Happen: Interviews on Greek Verb Endings. München: Lincom Europa.Google Scholar
Clark, E. V. and Clark, H. H. 1979. When Nouns Surface as Verbs. Language 55(4): 767–811. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Darby, J. 2015. The Processing of Conversion in English: Morphological Complexity and Underspecification. PhD Thesis, University of Oxford.Google Scholar
Díaz-Negrillo, A. and Fernández-Alcaina, C. (eds). 2018. Conversion: Limits, Interpretations. Thematic issue of Word Structure 11(2).Google Scholar
Dixon, R. W. 2014. Making New Words. Morphological Derivation in English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Efthymiou, A. 2011. The Semantics of Verb Forming Suffixes in Modern Greek. Proceedings of the Nineteenth International Symposium of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics. Thessaloniki, Greece. 3–5 April 2009. 174–184.Google Scholar
2014. Is there a Meaning Hierarchy in Verb-Forming Suffixation? Evidence from English and Modern Greek. Rivista di Linguistica 26(2): 99–122.Google Scholar
2015. Modern Greek Parasynthetic Verbs: A Hierarchical Relationship between Prefixes and Suffixes. In Affix Ordering across Languages and Frameworks, S. Manova (ed), 82–107. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2018. Ο σχηματισμός των ρημάτων στη νέα ελληνική γλώσσα [Verb Derivation in Modern Greek]. Αθήνα: Επίκεντρο.Google Scholar
Efthymiou, A., Fragaki, G. and Markos, A. 2012. Productivity of Verb-Forming Suffixes in Modern Greek: A Corpus-Based Study. Morphology 22(4): 515–543. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gaeta, L. 2013. Affix Ordering and Conversion: Looking for the Place of zero. Lingue e Linguaggio XII(2): 145–170.Google Scholar
Gast, V. 2014. Verb-Noun Compounds in English and German. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 56(3): 269–282.Google Scholar
Giannoulopoulou, G. 2015. Morphological Contrasts between Modern Greek and Italian. The Case of Compounding. Special Issue of Languages in Contrast 15(1): 65–80. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gottfurcht, C. 2008. Denominal Verb Formation in English. PhD Thesis, Northwestern University.Google Scholar
Haas, F. 2017. Motivating an English-German Contrast in Word Formation. Languages in Contrast 17(2): 183–204. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haselow, A. 2011. Typological Changes in the Lexicon. Analytic Tendencies in English Noun Formation. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hengeveld, K., Rijkhoff, J. and Siewierska, A. 2004. Parts-of-Speech Systems and Word Order. Journal of Linguistics 401: 527–570. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ježek, E. and Ramat, P. 2009. On Parts-of-Speech Transcategorization. Folia Linguistica 43(2): 391–416. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Krzeszowski, T. P. 1990. Contrasting Languages. The Scope of Contrastive Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ledgeway, A. 2012. From Latin to Romance. Morphosyntactic Typology and Change Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lefer, M.-A. and Cartoni, B. 2011. Prefixes in Contrast. Towards a Meaning-Based Contrastive Methodology for Lexical Morphology. Languages in Contrast 11(1): 87–105. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lehmann, C. 2008. Roots, Stems and Word Classes. Studies in Language 321: 546–567. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Levin, B. 1993. English Verb Classes and Alternations. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lieber, R. 2004. Morphology and Lexical Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lieber, R. and Štekauer, P. 2014. Introduction. The Scope of the Handbook. In The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology, R. Lieber and P. Štekauer (eds), 3–9. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Manova, S. 2011. Understanding Morphological Rules: With Special Emphasis on Conversion and Subtraction in Bulgarian, Russian and Serbo-Croatian (Studies in Morphology 1). Dordrecht: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Manzini, M. R. and Roussou, A. 2019. Morphological and Syntactic (non-)Finiteness. A Comparison between English and Balkan Languages. Quaderni di Linguistica e Studi Orientali/Working Papers in Linguistics and Oriental Studies 51: 195–229.Google Scholar
Marchand, H. 1969. The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word Formation. A Synchronic-Diachronic Approach (2nd edition). München: C.H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung.Google Scholar
Martsa, S. 2013. Conversion in English: A Cognitive Semantic Approach. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
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
Plag, I. 1999. Morphological Productivity: Structural Constraints in English Derivation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
2004. Syntactic Category Information and the Semantics of Derivational Morphological Rules. Folia Linguistica XXXVIII(3–4): 193–225.Google Scholar
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. and Svartvik, J. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Essex: Longman.Google Scholar
Ralli, A. 1999. Inflectional Features and the Morphological Module Hypothesis. In Working Papers in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics 6, A. Kakouriotis and V. Bolla-Mavrides (eds), 111–142. Thessaloniki: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.Google Scholar
2004. Stem-Based versus Word-Based Morphological Configurations: The Case of Modern Greek Preverbs. Lingue e Linguaggio 2004(2): 269–302.Google Scholar
2005. Μορφολογία [Morphology]. Athens: Patakis.Google Scholar
2008. Greek Deverbal Compounds with ‘Bound Stems’. Southern Journal of Linguistics 29(1/2): 150–173.Google Scholar
Spyropoulos, V., Revithiadou, A. and Panagiotidis, P. 2015. Verbalizers Leave Marks: Evidence from Greek. Morphology 25(3): 299–325. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Štekauer, P. 1996. A Theory of Conversion in English. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Štekauer, P., Valera, S. and Körtvélyessy, L. 2012. Word-Formation in the World’s Languages. A Typological Survey. New York: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Valera, S. 2014. Conversion. In The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology, R. Lieber and P. Štekauer (eds), 154–168. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
2015. Conversion. In Word-Formation. An International Handbook of the Languages of Europe (Volume 1), P. O. Müller, I. Ohnheiser, S. Olsen and F. Rainer (eds), 322–339. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vincent, N. 1997. Synthetic and Analytic Structures. In The Dialects of Italy, M. Maiden and M. Parry (eds), 99–105. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Vogel, P. M. 2005. Conversion and Derivation in Different Part-of-Speech Systems. In Wortarten und Grammatikalisierung, C. Knobloch and B. Schaeder (eds), 67–78. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Weiner, E. 2016. Grammatical Analysis and Grammatical Change. In The Oxford Handbook of Lexicography, P. Durkin (ed), 221–235. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Primary sources
Dictionary of Modern Greek. Available at [URL]
Oxford English Dictionary (online edition). Available at [URL]
Sketch Engine parallel corpora. Available at [URL]
Online etymology dictionary. Available at [URL]
Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Shao, Bin, Jing Zheng & Hendrik De Smet
2024. The blurring of the boundaries: changes in verb/noun heterosemy in Recent English. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 20:2 ► pp. 321 ff. DOI logo
Koutsoukos, Νikos & Angela Ralli
2023. Zero suffixes in Modern Greek derived adjectival formations with alpha privative. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 42:1 ► pp. 87 ff. DOI logo
Koutsoukos, Nikos & Laura A. Michaelis
2020. Pleonastic complex words as functional amalgams. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 34 ► pp. 199 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.