On Recent -bil Derivatives in Romanian
On Recent -bil Derivatives in Romanian

Summary/Abstract: The paper investigates a corpus of 72 recent -bil derivatives, used mainly in contemporary Romanian journalese (Croitor 2021). The paper shows that -bil adjectives in Romanian fall into two categories: fully eventive adjectives, characterized by the presence of by-phrases and/or adverbial event modifiers and fully stative adjectives, simply indicating a property of the referent (Oltra-Massuet 2013). A second result of the analysis is the fact that the boundary between the two identified classes is blurry, in the sense that -bil adjectives actually form a continuum from eventive adjectives to fully stative -bil adjectives (Wasak 2021). Thirdly, the productivity of -bil can be explained by means of usefulness, fashion, and nameability (Plag 2002).

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