The Role of Borrowing in the Derivation of Passive Potential Adjectives in Polish

Abstract

The chapter deals with the role of the [±native] marking in the formation of deverbal adjectives terminating in the suffix -alny in Polish and attributes the rise in the productivity of the suffix in the past fifty years to the linguistic influence of English. It is argued that the influx and subsequent adaptation of English verbs coupled with the speakers’ awareness that -able and -alny discharge similar roles in their respective systems of word formation has a role to play in raising the productivity of the suffix. A frequency analysis supported by diachronic information conducted on the National Corpus of the Polish Language reveals that the rule produces twice as many hapax legomena in the foreign subdomain. However, the formation of -alny derivatives on borrowed or adapted stems seems to have given a new impulse to the formation of passive potential adjectives based on native bases. This is due to the fact that, counter to what previous analyses concluded, the rule is operative on transitive eventive verbs forming aspectual pairs irrespective of whether they are [±native].