Adverbial phrases in Hasidic Yiddish

International Journal of the Sociology of Language. 2014.

Arkhangelskiy T., Panova T.

The purpose of our study is to investigate the lexicalization of so-called adverbial phrases, such as fun a mol, in modern Hasidic Yiddish in comparison with written literary Yiddish of the 20th century. The phenomenon in question is a historical process in which several lexemes forming a frequent collocation (including nouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and articles) merge into one, resulting in an independent lexeme in the modern language. The material the current research is based on comes from two sources, both of which represent Eastern Yiddish language at its modern stage as it is documented in printed materials (books and periodicals of the 20th-21st centuries) and on the Internet (a forum for the Yiddish-speaking orthodox Jews). As Yiddish texts, especially in electronic communication, do not follow one codified orthography, we show that the spelling can be used as a means of analyzing the degree of lexicalization of a phrase. The results of the process of lexicalization in these two varieties of Yiddish are compared in our paper.

Keywords: корпусная лингвистика, corpus linguistics, грамматикализация, grammaticalization, идиш, Yiddish, Hasidic Yiddish, lexicalization, хасидский идиш, лексикализация

Publication based on the results of: Создание и использование корпусных инструментов для изучения языка идиш (2014)