Instrument and place nouns: A typological and diachronic perspective

Abstract

Most patterns of word formation convey more than one meaning. Although multifunctionality is such a widespread phenomenon, only a limited number of topics, such as the polysemy of diminutives, action nouns and agent nouns, have received special attention in the theoretical literature. The present article focuses on instrument and place nouns, which are expressed by means of one and the same derivational pattern in more than half of the languages expressing these two concepts morphologically. The empirical assessment of this syncretism provides the starting point for an in-depth discussion of multifunctionality in word formation. After a review of the literature on monosemy, polysemy and homonymy, diachronic pathways leading to syncretism of instrument and place nouns are described in detail. It turns out that the syncretism is not due to a particular semantic affinity of the concepts 'instrument' and 'place', as sometimes assumed in the literature, including the recent semantic-maps approach. Instead, five different processes can be discerned which lead to the multifunctionality of the respective markers: reanalysis, concretization of action nouns, ellipsis, homonymization, and borrowing.

Acquisition of English nominal suffix -er by advanced EFL learners: a view from usage-based perspective

“…kneeler 'an object onto which one kneels', swiper 'an object through which one swipes credit cards,' gusher 'a blood vessel from which blood gushes.' Most locative objects are interpretable as instruments (Luschützky & Rainer, 2013: 1302-1303): a kneeler is also 'an object used for kneeling,' a swiper is also 'an object used to swipe credit cards.' Source locatives may invite agentive interpretations, e.g.…”

Morphology in Constraint-based Lexicalist Approaches to Grammar

“…Recent work on word formation has highlighted the importance of rivalry between processes: more often than not, a language offers more than one means to fill the onomasiological need for a new lexeme L ′ expressing meaning M ′ on the basis of an existing lexeme L expressing meaning M. A relevant example is that of English denominal verbs: as argued at length by Plag (1999), processes such as -ize suffixation, -ify suffixation, be-prefixation, and conversion, give rise to overlapping types of meanings, so that in some instances any of the processes could have been used to fill the same lexical need. When combined with the well-known observation that individual processes themselves are polysemous (for a recent appraisal see Luschützky and Rainer 2013), this leads to the view that lexeme formation involves a many-to-many relation between formal processes and semantic relations to be expressed. Table 1 illustrates this situation with examples from French deverbal nouns.…”

Homeric ‐phi(n)is an oblique case marker1

“… In the domain of derivational morphology, Luschützky & Rainer (2013) investigate a range of languages in which instrumental nouns and place nouns share a derivational pattern. …”