Searching for competing patterns in morphological derivation: the case of personal and agent nouns with borrowed roots in contemporary Lithuanian

• Žurnalo archyvas: straipsnio tekstas

ENThis article presents a study of the search for competing patterns that are characteristic of hybrid suffixed and borrowed personal and agent nouns in Lithuanian. In order to find out if the competing nouns, in reality, are synonymous, the research relies on ‘Interleksis’ – data from the electronic Dictionary of Internationalisms, the Dictionary of Contemporary Lithuanian, the Dictionary of Standard Lithuanian, the Dictionary of Lithuanian, the Database of Lithuanian Neologisms, the Corpus of Contemporary Lithuanian Language. In some cases, internet sources have also been used to check the existence of a competition between two nouns. Four competing patterns of hybrid suffixed and borrowed personal and agent nouns could be distinguished in contemporary Lithuanian, namely the patterns showing competition between: (1) hybrid derivatives and material borrowings, e.g. automobil-inink-as, -ė ‘motorist’ / automobil-ist-as, -ė ‘id.’, (2) hybrid derivatives, e.g. eksportuo-toj-as, -a ‘exporter’ / eksport-inink-as, -ė ‘id.’, (3) suffixed material borrowings, e.g. archyv-ist-as, -ė ‘archivist’ / archyv-ar-as, -ė ‘id.’, (4) the mixed pattern that includes a broad scale of competition between hybrid derivatives and two different types of material borrowings, e.g. strateguo-toj-as, -a ‘strategist’ / strateg-inink-as, -ė ‘id.’ / strateg-ist-as, -ė ‘id.’ / strateg-ik-as, -ė ‘id.’ / strateg-as, -ė ‘id.’. Patterns 1 and 3 cover two sub-patterns because of the existence of two types of material borrowings, i.e. suffixed and simplex borrowed nouns.We propose two types of competition between competing nouns: strong and weak. Strong competition occurs with a similar frequency of use of competing nouns, whereas weak competition manifests itself with a large difference in the frequency of use of competing nouns. The synchronic approach to the derivation of hybrid and borrowed suffixed personal and agent nouns has been adopted in the research. Keywords: strong competition, weak competition, hybrid derivative, correlative derivative, simplex material borrowing, personal noun, agent noun. [From the publication]