Publication: Agent Suffixes in Names of Profession in Old Church Slavonic
Loading...
Official URL
Full text at PDC
Publication Date
2010-05
Authors
Advisors (or tutors)
Editors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Citations
Exportar
Abstract
In this research, I intended to analyze the agent suffixes in Old Church Slavonic, trying to find out if there is any kind of motivation for the use of every morphological mark. Due to the wide extent of the subject, I focused on a semantic domain: the names of profession that can be found in the four “canonical” OCS Gospel manuscripts: Zographensis, Marianus, Assemanianus and Liber Savvae. As it is a well known fact, OCS is a language of translation from Greek. That’s why first of all it was necessary to check the Greek words translated by the OCS names in order to determine whether the Slavic suffixes and mechanisms of word formation could have been motivated by the Greek ones (see table 1). Besides, I considered some other criteria: the lexical base on which are formed the OCS names of profession (see table 2), as well as the different types of action expressed by every agent name (see table 3).
Comparing the mentioned suffixes with the Greek morphological marks, we observe that there is not a clear correspondence between them (see table 1). OCS names of profession cointaing the suffix -nikŭ translate Greek nouns with almost all the suffixes included in the research (except -ōnēs), and in three of them (-eus, -tēs, -os), being the majority option. But it shows a similar number of examples in all of them. Nevertheless, it’s clear that suffix -nikŭ is the most productive. OCS nouns in -tel’ĭ and -ĭcĭ render more often Greek nouns in -tēs, and -ĭcĭ together with -ar’ĭ show a preference for Greek compound words. However, while -ĭcĭ forms itself compound words (two of which translate Greek derived words), -ar’ĭ never does. Regarding the calques, we observe a high number of them in the names of profession in -nikŭ. The proportion of calques is even higher in the nouns in -tel’ĭ and -ĭcĭ. Just the terms ending in -ar’ĭ are not very prone to calques, including on the contrary three loanwords.
If we take a look at the second table, we can see that -tel’ĭ and -ĭcĭ are clearly deverbals and -ar’ĭ a denominal, while a big amount of the names of profession in -nikŭ are based on a nominal stem, and only a few of them have an adjectival/participial or verbal base. Like this, it seems to be a denominal that later would have spread to other categories. This spread could have been motivated by the merger of the suffix -nikŭ with the adjectival ending -inŭ as well as by a participial meaning of denominals in -nikŭ. As for the deverbals in -nikŭ most of them are derived from stative and/or prefixed verbs.
Switching to the third criterion, we remark a sort of distribution of some types of action among the different suffixes (see table 3). This way, we see how the actions of producing and transforming are concentrated in the suffix -tel’ĭ, while the meanings of standing, possessing and not agent are expressed mostly by nouns in -nikŭ.
To summarize, the results of this research could suggest a motivation of the usage of some OCS suffixes, but they are not conclusive and the study should be extended to the agent nouns of the whole “canonical” OCS.