Verbal morphology in the Database of New Borrowings into Lithuania

The Database of New Borrowings into Lithuanian lists 129 verbs which were either directly borrowed or derived from the borrowed nominal and adjectival stems. In terms of morphosyntactic adaptation, two suffixes, viz. -uo-ti and -in-ti, are used as indirect insertion strategy devices (Wohlgemuth 2009: 94 ff.). The suffix -uo-ti is the most productive verbal-izer in modern Lithuanian and is predominantly used to integrate the so-called international-isms in the standard language, while -in-ti is the main factitive/causative affix and is em-ployed in the non-standard language domain to accommodate the verbal borrowings coming mostly from English. In very many cases, verbs, nouns and some adjectives sharing the same stem were borrowed and I argue that a synchronic derivational link between them can be rec-ognized in Lithuanian, no matter what the derivational history of these words in the donor language was. If a borrowed verb has a suffix, but no corresponding noun or adjective is found in the current usage, the suffix can be interpreted as a device of morpho-syntactic adap-tation only. Compared to -uo-ti and -in-ti, other suffixes are only rarely attested in the data-base, but they clearly reflect productive types of verb formation, namely, the denominal similatives in -au-ti and the deadjectival inchoatives in -ė-ti. The data on prefixal and reflex-ive derivatives is too scarce to note any definite trends. As far as inflectional productivity is concerned, -in-ti and -uo-ti definitely play a major role in enriching the classes characterized by the present stem affixes of the a-type and the past stems affixes of the o-type. The inflex-ion of verbs in -uo-ti is also affected by morpho-phonological alternation of the suffix to re-solve hiatus, viz. the infinitive stem has /uo/ (no hiatus), the present stem is augmented by the palatal glide /j/ (-uoj-), while in the past stem, /uo/ is replaced by /av/ (i.e. -uo-ti, -uoj-a, -av-o)