Semantic categories like Action, Agent, Instrument, and Place are frequently marked by the same derivational affix in European Languages (e.g., player (Agent), steamer (Instrument), and diner (Place)); therefore, it has been widely accepted that the synchronic syncretism of the semantic categories results from semantic extension from Action through Agent and Instrument up to Place (Panagl 1975, 1978, Dressler 1980, 1986, Booij 1986, 2007, Luján 2010). In this paper, I investigate Old English (OE) multifunctional derivational suffixes and the cross-linguistic distribution of the semantic categories along the semantic extension axis. A closer look at the synchronic distribution of the categories reveals that some OE instances of the syncretism have not arisen by semantic extension, and the scenario about semantic transitions of the categories is hypothetical at least in the cases of the OE suffixes. I argue that the syncretism should be understood, instead, as the result of change in the status of semantic features comprising the categories, and that my feature-based analysis gives more reliable insights into the mechanism underlying the cross-linguistic recurrence of linguistic patterns.
1. Introduction
2. OE Multifunctional Derivational suffixes
3. Empirical Evidence Against the Semantic Extension/Map Approach
4. Multifunctionality and Feature Change
5. Conclusion
References