Mailegatze morfologikoa eta generoa euskaraz

Abstract

Due to the long-term situation of intensive contact, basque has borrowed a number of morphemes from Latin and romance languages. Whilst certain varieties show an incipient inflectional distinction of gender as a result of the borrowing of lexical pairs ended in ‐o/‐a, eastern basque has to a certain extent acquired a derivational gender distinction by means of the romance-origin suffix ‐sa. based on a corpus of historical souletin, in this paper we analyse the occurrences of the morpheme ‐sa. Moreover, we will show that present-day eastern basque speakers continue to use ‐sa as a productive suffix, despite the fact that the royal Academy of the basque Language has advised against it.