PRODUCTIVITY AND FREQUENCY OF SOME LATINATE VERB PREFIXES IN ENGLISH AND SERBIAN

Abstract

The Latin language was the Lingua Franca of the ancient world, and the precursor of Romance languages. As such, it had a huge influence on European languages, and we can find elements of Latin both in English and in Serbian. In this paper, four Latinate verb prefixes with spatial and temporal meanings have been examined, and those are: trans-, re-, intra-, and post-, and their frequencies and productivities in both languages have been calculated. The analysis was made on the English corpus BNCweb, and the Serbian corpus srWaC, based on the hypothesis that these prefixes would be more frequent and productive in English, which was more exposed to Latin and Romance languages.

Keywords

• verb prefix
• frequency
• productivity
• morphology
• corpus linguistics