Aspects of morphological adaptation and word-formation in Slovak Gallicisms

The issue of language contact and the resulting taking over of lexemes from L1 to L2 has long been an object of keen interest for linguists. In contemporary Slovak, we register about 3,000 loan words from French. In the linguistic contact between French and Slovak, there are two primary aspects which can be perceived in the process of integration of loanwords, i.e., the aspect of morphological adaptation and the word-formation aspect. The first aspect refers to the natural process of morphological adaptation of a lexeme from analytic French, which is necessary for the integration and the functioning of this lexeme in the grammatical system of the flectional Slovak language. This process is accompanied by numerous adaptation mechanisms and their results, such as the change of pronunciation, orthography, grammatical gender assignment, etc. The second aspect refers to the word-formation potential of a lexeme in L2, where it is used as a motivating element in word-formation nests and word-formation series. In the examined set of words, the proportion of morphologically adapted but unmotivated lexemes and complex words resulting from them (mostly derivatives) is 1:3 (750 unmotivated words, 2,200 motivated words). The analysis of inflectional and derivational formatives of Gallicisms shows a rather non-negligible degree of polyfunctionality of such affixes, which is present mostly in adjectives and verbs. This means that one and the same formant has an inflectional (grammatical) function in lexically unmotivated word, while in derivatives it has a word-formative function (for example -ný, -ovať).