Bloch-Trojnar, Maria, “A corpus-based perspective on the formation of passive potential adjectives in Irish”, Journal of Celtic Linguistics 20 (2019): 1–29.
- journal article
This paper demonstrates that a quantitative frequency analysis of the data (Baayen 1992, 1993) from the New Corpus for Ireland (Nua-Chorpas na hÉireann) can shed new light on certain problems inherent in a purely qualitative analysis of passive potential adjectives as proposed in Bloch-Trojnar (2016). The range and status of so- and in- derivatives (including derivational doublets) are discussed on the basis of their semantics, distribution and frequency and it is argued that both so- and in- should be regarded as exponents of potential or objective adjectives in Irish. The respective derivatives show no marked differences in token frequencies, which does not allow us to classify one or the other as being more entrenched or less productive, since in both we find a comparable proportion of high and low frequency items. A corpus analysis allows us to establish that the range of in- derivatives is expanding at the expense of so- derivatives, but this expansion has not yet reached the systemic level of productivity restrictions. The semantic and syntactic constraints on the rule do not allow us to disjunctively specify the exact domains of the prefixes. In the class of transitive verbs so- shows a preference for verbs of motion, and in- for verbs of measure, transfer of possession, judgement verbs and SE verbs. Another piece of evidence in favour of subsuming so- and in- under one word formation rule is that the negative prefix do- attaches indiscriminately to both so- and in- formations.
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