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Hybrid Characteristics of Prefixed Verbs in Yiddish

Summary

The paper looks at how centuries of contact with Semitic and Slavic languages reshaped the Germanic verb-prefix system of Yiddish. It focuses on the separable prefix ariber-. The author compares Yiddish prefixed verbs with their German counterparts using dictionary definitions and a targeted selection of literary examples. The analysis is conceptual, contrastive, componential and "polysituational." It rests on three notions: the archiseme (an etymologically grounded semantic invariant), the situatheme, and the conceptualization of a situation. The paper explains the change through Talmy's "hybrid polysemy": a German form with German meaning took on closely related Slavic meaning, so this is not homonymy. ariber- keeps the core sense "over" and frames motion from a source to a goal across a possible barrier. It can do this symmetrically, where motion really passes over something, or asymmetrically, where nothing actually goes over. The result is that Yiddish verbs can express situations that German prefixed verbs cannot but Slavic ones can. The same stem also accepts more competing prefixes, which produces synonym series. The work matters for contact linguistics and for modelling meaning shifts in particles and prefixes.

Key points

  • Eight prefixes are classed as having hybrid polysemy: the inseparable tse- and the separable ariber-, avek-, funander-, iber-, op-, oys- and tsu-.
  • The paper lists hybridization mechanisms from simplest to most complex:
    • outright borrowings;
    • Semitic and Slavic copies;
    • contact-driven innovations inside the German layer (word-formation, semantic, morphosyntactic);
    • purely internal innovations.
  • ariber- derives from Middle High German har über and has the archiseme "over." German splits the same meaning by direction (herüber "hither" vs hinüber "thither"), while one Yiddish prefix covers both.
  • The examples cover two kinds of conceptualization:
    • Symmetric: flying over to a farm, stepping over a threshold.
    • Asymmetric: swimming across a river, a shawl thrown over shoulders, aribertrogn in the abstract sense "endure."
  • Data comes from the Groyser verterbukh fun der yidisher shprakh and from texts by Mendele, Sholem-Aleykhem and Sutskever. The paper is dated 2020, vol. 22(4), per its DOI.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Give each prefix one etymologically motivated core sense (an archiseme) and derive every concrete reading from it, instead of listing unrelated senses — For Mova (world): English particles like "over" (go over, get over, carry over) could get one invariant core in the verb-class knowledge, with literal and abstract readings linked to it explainably.
  • I2. Separate symmetric readings (the event really passes over something) from asymmetric ones (the prefix imposes an "over" path the real event lacks) — For Mova (frames): the prag frame builder could flag particle verbs as literal or projected motion, so "got over the illness" is not turned into a spatial path in the role frame.
  • I3. Model motion events with a fixed schema: source point, goal point, path, and an optional barrier the mover overcomes — For Mova (world): entity-state tracking could store motion as source/goal/barrier slots, which helps answer "where did the rats end up?" in fable QA.
  • I4. Treat deictic direction (toward vs away from the speaker) as a separate feature, since one language marks it and the other leaves it out — For Mova (back): when generating or translating through the meta-world, keep hither/thither as an optional attribute so text can be produced in either style without losing meaning.
  • I5. Separable prefixes behave much like detachable verb particles, so the verb+prefix pair forms one meaning unit even when split in the sentence — For Mova (tree): the parser and lemmatizer could join verbs with their compound:prt particles into a single predicate lemma before frame lookup, so "carry the box over" maps to the right verb class.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.21603/2078-8975-2020-22-4-1143-1151

@inproceedings{shishigin2021hybrid,
  title = {{Hybrid Characteristics of Prefixed Verbs in Yiddish}},
  author = {Shishigin, K. A.},
  booktitle = {Вестник Кемеровского государственного университета 22},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.21603/2078-8975-2020-22-4-1143-1151},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.21603/2078-8975-2020-22-4-1143-1151}
}

References

11 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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