Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- List of ISO-639 Language Codes
- Introduction
- 1 Word Formation, Borrowing and their Interaction
- Part I Compounding
- 2 Compounding and Contact
- 3 Neoclassical Compounds between Borrowing and Word Formation
- 4 Borrowed Compounds, Borrowed Compounding – Portuguese Data
- 5 Compound Calques in an Eighteenth-Century German-Lithuanian Dictionary
- 6 (Pseudo-)Anglicisms as Nominal Compounds in Italian
- Part II Affixation
- 7 The Role of Borrowing in the Derivation of Passive Potential Adjectives in Polish
- 8 How an ‘Italian’ Suffix Became Productive in Germanic Languages
- 9 The Suffixes -ismus and -ita in Nouns in Czech
- 10 The Interaction between Borrowing and Word Formation: Evidence from Modern Greek Prefixes
- Part III Naming in Minority Languages
- 11 Loanword Formation in Minority Languages: Lexical Strata in Titsch and Töitschu
- 12 Examining the Integration of Borrowed Nouns in Immigrant Speech: The Case of Canadian Greek
- 13 Interaction among Borrowing, Inflection and Word Formation in Polish Medieval Latin
- Conclusion
- 14 Trends in the Interaction between Borrowing and Word Formation
- Author Index
- Subject Index
10 - The Interaction between Borrowing and Word Formation: Evidence from Modern Greek Prefixes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- List of ISO-639 Language Codes
- Introduction
- 1 Word Formation, Borrowing and their Interaction
- Part I Compounding
- 2 Compounding and Contact
- 3 Neoclassical Compounds between Borrowing and Word Formation
- 4 Borrowed Compounds, Borrowed Compounding – Portuguese Data
- 5 Compound Calques in an Eighteenth-Century German-Lithuanian Dictionary
- 6 (Pseudo-)Anglicisms as Nominal Compounds in Italian
- Part II Affixation
- 7 The Role of Borrowing in the Derivation of Passive Potential Adjectives in Polish
- 8 How an ‘Italian’ Suffix Became Productive in Germanic Languages
- 9 The Suffixes -ismus and -ita in Nouns in Czech
- 10 The Interaction between Borrowing and Word Formation: Evidence from Modern Greek Prefixes
- Part III Naming in Minority Languages
- 11 Loanword Formation in Minority Languages: Lexical Strata in Titsch and Töitschu
- 12 Examining the Integration of Borrowed Nouns in Immigrant Speech: The Case of Canadian Greek
- 13 Interaction among Borrowing, Inflection and Word Formation in Polish Medieval Latin
- Conclusion
- 14 Trends in the Interaction between Borrowing and Word Formation
- Author Index
- Subject Index
Summary
In this chapter, I discuss two cases of Modern Greek prefixes whose extensive use in loan translations from foreign languages reveals a complex interplay between borrowing and word formation. The prefixes υπϵρ- and αντι- derive from Ancient Greek prepositions (υπέρ ‘over, beyond’ and αντί ‘in front of, instead of’, respectively), but, in the course of their grammaticalisation into prefixes, they have also developed some additional non-locational meanings: e.g. ‘excess’ (υπϵρ-ϵργασία [ipererγasia] ‘overwork’), ‘against, opposing’ (αντι-αμϵρικανικός [andiamerikanikos] ‘anti-american’). Given the extensive use of Greek prefixes in loan translations, I address the following questions:
How does calquing influence word formation processes in contemporary Greek?
Does borrowing affect the meaning of Modern Greek prefixes?
It is shown that borrowing constitutes a trigger for the expansion of the domain of use and the development of polysemy in Modern Greek prefixation (cf. also Rainer 2009). Furthermore, I investigate the factors that can account for the prevalence of all these loan translations, as opposed to direct borrowings. Moreover, I focus on how loan translations with υπϵρ- and αντι- are recorded in the Practical Dictionary of Modern Greek of the Academy of Athens (PDA 2014). The chapter is organised as follows. Section 1 gives some background information on lexical borrowing. Section 2 offers a brief overview of the relevant literature on the characteristics of the Modern Greek vocabulary, while section 3 discusses various issues concerning so-called International Greek and international affixes. Section 4 offers a brief presentation of the etymological and semantic properties of the prefixes under investigation. Section 5 explains how the data of this study were collected. Furthermore, it provides quantitative data which show that υπϵρ- and αντι- are extensively used in lexical borrowings in Modern Greek and that the vast majority of these borrowings are loan translations. Section 6 is dedicated to loan translations in Greek and their relation with linguistic purism. It also discusses the treatment of loan translations in Greek dictionaries. Section 7 describes the main properties of loan translations with the prefixes αντι- and υπϵρ- and shows that the semantic domain of both prefixes was extended under a French or English influence so as to include more specialised meanings. Finally, section 8 summarises the findings of the present study.
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- The Interaction of Borrowing and Word Formation , pp. 196 - 212Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020