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Paradigms in Word Formation: Theory and applications
Edited by Alba E. Ruz, Cristina Fernández-Alcaina and Cristina Lara-Clares
[Studies in Language Companion Series 225] 2022
► pp. 249–282

Chapter 10
Complex verbs

The interplay of suffixation, conversion, and parasynthesis in Portuguese and English

| Universidade de Lisboa | The Word Lab

Denominal and deadjectival complex verbs form a heterogenous set. They all belong to the coarse-grained class of causative verbs, but they may be obtained by different morphological processes, namely suffixation (coden → codifyv; laicadj → laicizev), conversion (watern → waterv; dryadj → dryv), or parasynthesis (globen → englobev; richadj → enrichv). The focus of this paper is on the description and comparative analysis of the three processes, based mainly on data from European Portuguese (e.g., planificarv ‘plan’, jogarv ‘play’, esburacarv ‘make a hole’, fragilizarv ‘fragilize’, secarv ‘dry’, envelhecerv ‘grow old’) and English (e.g., codify, play, debug, fragilize, dry, enrich). The analysis will deal with each of these verb-forming processes individually and how they relate with each other.

Keywords: complex verbs, conversion, parasynthesis, Portuguese, English
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Denominal and deadjectival verbs: General differences and similarities
    • 2.1A phonetic constraint
    • 2.2Semantic generalization and semantic constraint
    • 2.3Summary
  • 3.Verb-forming suffixation
    • 3.1The Latin suffix -ific-
    • 3.2The Latin suffix -sc-
    • 3.3The Greek suffix -ίζειν (-izein)
    • 3.4Summary
  • 4.Conversion
    • 4.1English data
    • 4.2Portuguese data
    • 4.3Summary
  • 5.Parasynthesis
    • 5.1The status of parasynthetic prefixes
    • 5.2Suffixes in parasynthetic verbs
    • 5.3Conversion in parasynthetic verbs
    • 5.4English parasynthetics
    • 5.5Summary
  • 6.The interplay of verb-forming suffixation, conversion, and parasynthesis
  • 7.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 September 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.225.10vil
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