A CONSTRUCTION MORPHOLOGY ACCOUNT OF AGENT NOUNS IN MODERN GREEK

Abstract

In this paper, we deal with the formation of agent nouns in Modern Greek. We present the formal and semantic properties of Greek masculine and feminine agent nouns and compare them to relevant cross-linguistic data. We argue that: a) both masculine and feminine agent suffixes are attached directly to verbal stems, b) masculine and feminine agent nouns should be considered as coderivatives and c) the feminine suffixes -tria and -tra are competing suffixes with overlapping domains. Moreover, we discuss some controversial issues related to agent noun formation, such as the formalization of cases that display co-occurrence of two derivational processes and the pragmatic restrictions imposed on agent noun coining. We make use of a Construction Morphology framework (Booij 2005a), which handles agent noun formation adequately and offers interesting insights to Morphological Theory in general.