Productivity of the verbal inflectional classes

Productivity of the verbal inflectional classes 157(13) English to help > za-help-it’ (za- pure aspectual perfective suffix + -i- thematic vowel ofthe MC 3)cf. derivation of a verb from the loan noun:(14) English haker > hač-it’ (typical indigenous alternation k//č) and its perfectivecounterpart hak-nut’or from the former loan noun already ‘well-established’ and turned to be indigenous in thelanguage:(15) German Kurort > kurort kurort-ničat’ with two meanings ‘to have a rest at a healthresort’ and ‘to behave like at a health resort’, MC 1.These kinds of incompatibilities seem to be the most difficult to overcome, because severalunfitting properties have to be accommodated. Examples like (12) and (13) show the highestdegree of productivity because the loan verb undergoes indigenous process of perfectivization(together with the accommodation to the system) and, in the case of (12), accommodates theverb with the one element.For a richly-inflected language like Russian it is, probably, more difficult toaccommodate loan words with unfitting properties than for a poor inflected language likeEnglish, where the same phonological word may belong to the class of nouns and verbs. As aresult, a loan word needs less indigenous formation rules to be accommodated to a certainclass and mainly the unfitting phonological shape of a loan word has to be overcome:(16) Russian glasnost’ > English glasnost (Green’s dictionary 1992: 109), [t’] is substitutedwith [t],(17) Yiddish naschen > English nosh (American Heritage Dictionary 1982: 849), the final–en is cut off (a o) and the word is used as a verb and a noun,(18) indigenous English abbreviation nuke ‘nuclear weapon’ (Green 1992: 186): a verb and anoun.4 InferenceVerbs in Russian have a defined stem structure which determines the assignment of averb to a certain productive class or unproductive group. The absolute majority of loan verbsdo not have such structure and, thus, lack relevant compatible properties (although,theoretically, one should admit such a possibility). Some loan verbs (and, generally, nouns),however, develop a certain counterpart – an indigenous affix assigning them to a specificproductive MC. Actually, no productive verbal MC assigns loan verbs according to criteria b)except for the MC 2 which has developed the stable correlate –irova- to the group of Germanverbs in –ieren. As to loan nouns, they can have both fitting and unfitting properties and, thus,will be borrowed according to criteria a) and b).