Morphological borrowing from English to Norwegian: The enigmatic non-possessive -s

Abstract

AbstractWith increased lexical influence and general English competence among Norwegian language users, the association of the suffix -swith the category of plural appears to be expanding. This article explores the occurrence and productivity of non-possessive -sin contemporary Norwegian, a feature which incorporates several phenomena. Our aim is to chart the lexico-grammatical categories instantiated by this morpho-phonological segment in light of the previous literature on Anglicisms in Norwegian and on the basis of empirical evidence from present-day language use. The article presents a corpus-based survey of categories where non-possessive -soccurs (i) as the plural marker of Anglicisms, e.g.drinks; (ii) in colloquialisms such asdritings‘dead drunk’ – a combination of a domestic noun and English (or Norwegian) -ing+ non-possessive -sreanalysed into an adjectival stem; (iii) in nouns likeen caps‘a (baseball) cap’, where it has lost its plurality marking function and become part of the lexical stem; and (iv) sporadically as a plurality marker of domestic or non-English words, e.g.temas. The variability in presence vs. absence of -sis further explored in four case studies dedicated to different stages of borrowing.