Stefanie Kuzmack
Department of Linguistics
University of Chicago
1010 E. 59th St.
Chicago, IL 60615
e-mail: Kuzmack AT uchicago.edu
Presentations:
LSA 2007, session on historical syntax
Ish: A new case of antigrammaticalization
The history of the English morpheme –ish is a clear-cut instance of degrammaticalization. This paper applies Haspelmath’s (2004) concept of antigrammaticalization and the stringent criteria that it sets for legitimate examples of degrammaticalization to the case of –ish (‘somewhat’). Although Haspelmath found only nine examples that met his criteria, -ish does so, as well: it has gradually degrammaticalized, moving from a suffix, to an enclitic, to an independent word, and has preserved its identity as a qualifier throughout. Ish thus constitutes a tenth example of antigrammaticalization and the third in English alone.
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