Word formation and word history: The case of CAPITALIST and CAPITALISM

Rainer, Franz (2018) Word formation and word history: The case of CAPITALIST and CAPITALISM. In: The lexeme in descriptive and theoretical morphology. Language Science Press, Berlin. pp. 43-65. ISBN 978-3-96110-110-8

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Abstract

The treatment of the history of modern vocabulary in historical and etymological dictionaries is generally disappointing, especially with respect to the processes by which the words came into being. The TLFi1 only provides the following information concerning the history of French capitalisme and capitaliste: "Capitalisme [...] Dér. de capital²"; suff. -isme*", "Capitaliste [...] Dér. de capital*; suff. -iste*". Such a treatment, which is inadequate even from a synchronic point of view (in the sense "a supporter of capitalism", capitaliste is derived from capitalisme by affix substitution), does not do justice to the manifold relationships that have developed between these two words and their common base capital in the course of the 300 years since the creation of Dutch Capitalist in 1621. The present paper retraces in detail the many steps of the unfolding of these two words in French. It is shown that each of their many senses constitutes a separate lexeme and must be provided with an etymology of its own. Particular attention is dedicated to the identification of the exact mechanism (borrowing, semantic extension, word formation) that was at work at each step.

Item Type:	Book Section
Divisions:	Departments > Fremdsprachliche Wirtschaftskommunik. > Romanische Sprachen Kompetenzzentren > Zentrum für Wirtschaftssprachen
Version of the Document:	Published
Depositing User:	Gertraud Novotny
Date Deposited:	28 Sep 2018 11:45
Last Modified:	29 Aug 2020 06:55
Related URLs:	https://github.com/langsci/165 https://paperhive.org/documents/items/_H... http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/16... http://langsci-press.org/index
FIDES Link:	https://bach.wu.ac.at/d/research/results/87123/
URI:	https://epub.wu.ac.at/id/eprint/6537

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