Abstract
In this paper we investigate a case of borrowing of English noun-noun (nn) constructs into Georgian. The phenomenon has been observed lately in Georgian in sequences of two nouns, where the first noun, always marked by nominative, represents the dependent noun and the second is the head of the construct.
In English, nn constructs can potentially be analyzed as phrases or compounds. There have been no tests developed for Georgian so far that would help to decide the status of such sequences. We try to address this problem and propose several phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic criteria to distinguish compounds from phrases in nn constructs. The tests indicate that the borrowed pattern represents compounds in Georgian. This result raises some interesting research questions about category change in pattern borrowing.
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Notes
- 1.
Other abbreviations: dat = dative; erg = ergative; m = masculine; nom = nominative; pl = plural; rel = relative clause marker; sup = superlative; voc = vocative.
- 2.
In the examples we indicate all language names except Georgian and English.
- 3.
The -\(\emptyset \) represents one of the allomorphs of the nom case morpheme which is exclusively associated with vowel-final stems. Compare consonant-final stems, which get marked by -i in nom (see tbilis-i or cenṭral-i in (2b)).
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- 12.
One can recall other similar cards, also with a depicted image of an animal or a plant. For instance, the American Eagle credit card for customers of American Eagle Outfitters or the Rose gift card of the Japanese department store chain Takashimaya.
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The form vesi+pullo is a compound according to the criteria used to distinguish between compounds and multilexical expressions in Finnish. Among these criteria are the rule of encliticizing particles and the prosodic rule of main stress application. Namely, enclitic particles can be attached to every word of multiword expressions but only to the end of compounds [12, p. 192].
- 15.
Note that we distinguish two zeros: by \(\varnothing \) we indicate deleted heads in phrases (see examples (16b), (33b), (40b)) or compounds (see examples (17b), (34b)). As for \(\emptyset \), as we have already mentioned earlier, it is used to denote zero allomorphs (see, for instance, (1) among many examples in this paper).
- 16.
In speech one could encounter the starred nn construct čem saxl-s where the modifier does not get case-marked. However, although the application of dat case marking is not a very strong test for distinguishing phrases vs. compounds, any of the nom, erg, and voc case marking is.
- 17.
h stands for high tone and l for low tone.
- 18.
The suffix -i in family names is a remnant of the gen case marker -is.
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- 20.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Alice C. Harris and the anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions, and the editors for their support in the preparation of the final version of the paper. This work has been supported by the Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation under the project 217500.
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Amiridze, N., Asatiani, R., Baratashvili, Z. (2019). Compounds or Phrases? Pattern Borrowing from English into Georgian. In: Silva, A., Staton, S., Sutton, P., Umbach, C. (eds) Language, Logic, and Computation. TbiLLC 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11456. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-59565-7_1
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