Particle Verbs in Upper Sorbian - the Genesis of a New Word Formation Type as a Consequence of the Contact to German

0421533 - SLÚ 2014 eng C - Conference Paper (international conference)
Brankatschk, Katja
Particle Verbs in Upper Sorbian - the Genesis of a New Word Formation Type as a Consequence of the Contact to German.
2012.
[Universals and Typology in Word-Formation II. Pavol Jozef Šafárik University Košice, Faculty of Arts (SK), 26.08.2012 - 28.08.2012]
R&D Projects: GA ČR(CZ) GPP406/11/P424
Institutional support: RVO:68378017
Keywords : Upper Sorbian * Language contact * Word formation * Verbal aspect * Particle verbs
Subject RIV: AI - Linguistics

Particle verbs are not typical for Slavic languages. In my poster I present the usage of the particle won (German aus 'out') in contrast to the almost homonymous prefix wu- in Older Upper Sorbian on the basis of a corpus of about 2000 particle and prefix verbs. The distribution of the two types seems to be purely lexical. The particle won fills a semantic gap which emerged under the influence of the contact language German as well as through indigenous phonological develpments in Sorbian. The verb particle remains aspectually neutral, there is no evidence for a systematical formation of aspect pairs of the type won hić - wuńć 'to go outside'. In Modern Sorbian, this distribution is not evident anymore. This is due to the puristic elimination of particle verbs with the help of prefix vers during the "national revival" in the 19th century. Although the roots of Upper Sorbian particle verbs are lexical borrowings, in Older Upper Sorbian can be observed independent word formation processes with the particle won.
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0227875