Professor emerita Karin Aijmer presents a comparative study of -ish in English and Swedish blogs. The event is part of the research area Linguistic Structures' seminar series. All interested are welcome!
Ish is a suffix which can be attached to adjectives in English with the approximative meaning ‘somewhat X, vaguely X’ (tallish, bluish). In current English a new use of ish has emerged in informal language which is separated from its base form (indicated by space or by orthographic devices). This new ish has been extended to bases (other than adjectives), it is used in unusual and creative combinations and it can occur on its own as a pragmatic marker with hedging function. The exceptional properties of ish have been difficult to analyse in traditional grammatical theory. I argue that the productivity and new word formations with ish can be triggered by the maxim of extravagance (Haspelmath 2009; Eitelmann and Haumann 2022).
The innovative ish has been imported into Swedish in patterns where -ish is added to a Swedish base (e.g. trött-ish). The relevant research questions concern the extent to which the ‘extravagant’ ish has been borrowed into Swedish in the same structures and with the same functions as in English. What are the mismatches when the languages are contrasted, and what adaptations of ish take place in the recipient language as an outcome of the borrowing process?
Methodologically the study involves comparing the productivity and uses of ish in comparable corpora of blogs in English (the Birmingham Blog corpus) and in Swedish (the Korp Blog Corpus).
Eitelmann, M. and D. Haumann. 2022. Extravagance in morphology: Introduction.. In Eitelmann, M. and D. Haumann, Extravagant morphology. Studies in rule-bending, pattern-extending and theory-challenging morphology. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pp.1-17.
Haspelmath, Martin. 1999. Why is grammaticalization irreversible? Linguistics 37(6):1043-1068.