engleski

Word-formation as a complex product of lexico- grammatical relations: A study of Croatian nouns prefixed with nad- and pod-

In this paper we present an analysis of Croatian nouns formed through simple prefixation (e.g. Körtvelyessy and Genči 2017) with the antonymous prefixes nad- ‘over-‘ and pod- ‘under-‘. We approach these prefix-formations as doubly motivated (e.g. Raffaelli 2013), both formally and semantically. More precisely, we hypothesize that all grammatical (word-formation) mechanisms always entail semantic change. This hypothesis is in line with the general Cognitive Linguistic tenet that symbolic units are the basic units of natural languages (Taylor 2003:38-58), or put differently, that there cannot be form without meaning in language (Tesnière 1976:39). Our main study question in this paper is, therefore, what occurs on the semantic level of these prefix-formations in Croatian. In order to answer that question, we have extracted all nouns beginning with nad- and pod- from hrWaC (Baroni et al. 2009), the largest extant Croatian corpus, with a minimal frequency of 10 occurrences. This is in line with the general usage-based approach adopted in Cognitive Linguistics (e.g. Evans and Green 2006). The corpus results were manually checked for typos, words that are not a result of prefixation and other types of noise. The final list consisted of a total of 258 nouns, 58 formed with nad- and 200 with pod-. All the prefixed nouns were analysed semantically on the basis of the context in which they are used in the corpus and meanings attested in the Croatian Language Portal (HJP). Our analysis has demonstrated that, first of all, when the prefixes nad- and pod- are attached to nominal bases, they construe a polysemous semantic network resembling that of categories traditionally labelled “lexical” such as nouns or verbs. Concrete spatial meanings make 24% of all the meanings of the prefix nad- (e.g. nadlak ‘lit. over-polish ; topcoat’) and 10% of the meanings of the prefix pod- (e.g. podzid ‘lit. subwall’). In other words, the meanings of the two prefixes are predominantly extended, mostly based on orientational metaphors of the general type MORE/BETTER IS UP (e.g. nadbiskup ‘archbishop’) and WORSE/LESS IS DOWN (e.g. potpukovnik ‘lit. under-lieutenant ; lieutenant colonel’) (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1980), by which more positive phenomena are conceptualized as being located higher in space, while less positive phenomena are thought of as being located in inferior spatial positions. Not only does prefixation with nad- and pod- often entail metaphorization, but it also frequently leads to hyponymy. For instance, nadstolnjak ‘lit. above-tablecloth ; table runner’ is a type of stolnjak ‘tablecloth’ and pothodnik ‘underpass’ is a type of hodnik ‘pass’. Thus nad- and pod- formations contribute to lexical enrichment by building a number of nouns a majority of which are hyponyms of their bases. In addition to hyponymy, the prefixes nad- and pod- also build antonymy relations: there are 13 pairs of antonymous nouns (e.g. nadnaslov ‘supertitle’ – podnaslov ‘subtitle’) and 7 pairs of antonymous prefixal meanings (e.g. ‘superiority’ – ‘inferiority’, ‘control’ – ‘lack of control’), altogether. This study has demonstrated that word-formation phenomena such as simple prefixation cannot be analysed thoroughly without considering both the formal (grammatical) and semantic level, and therefore prove the necessity of the grammar- lexicon continuum.

nouns ; (simple) prefixation ; Croatian

nije evidentirano