RECONSTRUCTING СONTACT LINKAGE IN THE DEVERBAL FAMILIES OF MIDDLE ENGLISH

Анотація

Falling back on the age differentials of the diachronic textual prototypes of verbs and their sharedroot derivatives аs well as on the prototypes of coinages that were lacking their parent verb, the latter would be attested only after the Middle English period, the types and subtypes of the contact links of the interaction of Middle English word formation with the respective French or Latinate lexical or derivational copies were established. Three situations of contact linkage have been recovered to reveal the involvement of just implicitly motivated deverbal coinages entering Middle English, the cases of back derived coinage-verb pairs in Middle English, instances of the simultaneous entry of shared-root verbs and derivatives within the agreed minimal prototypes age differential and the borrowing of verbs to be supplemented by substantially later ME or/and post-ME-shared-root coinages. The contributions of the Latinate and French layers to ME derivation are recoverable from the framework as well as some peculiarities of the formants involvement in the copying process leading to the ultimate insertion of the verb. The contact status of a suffix is believed to be determinable on the basis of its ratio between the replicated copies and active derivatives. Suggested within the developed framework is a mechanism for the modelling of the corresponding contact configurations in shared-root deverbal derivability. The spread of each subtype of contact interaction has been ascertained with due account of the factors of its cogni-tive and pragmatic make-up in the history of English lexicon. Keywords: reconstruction, deverbal word formation, language contacts, clamps, contact links, contact status of the suffix.