Laenamine, analoogia ja tähendus liitnimisõnamoodustuses
Borrowing, analogy and semantics in compound word formation

Summary/Abstract: The article compares nominative and genitive compounding in Estonian compound nouns. The analysis is based on the nearly 3,300 questions on the subject, which have been filed in the Language Advice database of the Institute of the Estonian Language from 1995–2020. The database material is juxtaposed with the relevant data drawn from the Sketch Engine corpus Estonian National Corpus 2019. A closer look is taken at the compounding of the first components (borrowed or genuine) in the compound nouns. The analysis concerns certain bigger word groups as well as some more problematic individual words, following the emergence and evolution of compounding rules and examining, based on user data, how the rules have changed by the time the compound word makes its way to the orthological dictionary, specifically on the example of compound nouns where the attributive part has an instrumental meaning.The group of foreign words used as first components contain both older (e.g. kontroll ’control’, kontsert ’concert’, treening ’workout’) and newer words (e.g. liising ’leasing’, vegan). In addition, there are some older loanwords (e.g. ekspert ’expert’, projekt ’project’, kuller ’courier’) which have only become productive in compounding over the last decades. It turns out that some of the older foreign words used as first components have been included in the dictionary despite their deviant compounding (mostly accepted in use, though), where the attributive word occurs either in the nominative case instead of the expected genitive (e.g. compounds beginning with kontsert- or kontroll-) or where both nominative and genitive compounding are used in parallel. In newer compounds, however, both the orthological dictionary and the answers provided by the Language Advice reveal a tendency to subject the first component of foreign origin to Estonian compounding rules. One of the reasons may lie in the consideration that a ”nip in the bud” would probably foster the victory of the Estonian pattern of compounding, but this need not always be the case. According to the corpus study, the compounds beginning with liising-, for example, do obey the Estonian rule of genitive compounding (not, however, the tennis-compounds, despite their similar structure), whereas most of the compounds beginning with, e.g., ekspert- or vegan- have stuck to their foreign bias towards nominative compounding, even if it leads to the formation of consonant clusters (like in ekspertgrupp vs eksperdigrupp). Language users hesitations in compounding are reflected in the queries submitted to the Language Advice database, where questions concerning attributive words of foreign origin are about twice as frequent as those concerning genuine ones.

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