Russian word-formation in contrast with Czech and Norwegian

Abstract

Although some scholarship on metonymy has mentioned examples of word-formation and some scholarship on word-formation has mentioned the presence of metonymy, to date there has been no attempt to examine the systematic role of metonymy in the domain of word-formation. This article presents an empirical study of the metonymies signalled by derivational suffixes in Russian, Czech and Norwegian. This approach facilitates cross-linguistic comparison that reveals significant differences among languages, and these differences appear relevant to cultural differences.