Back-formation and conversion in the historical grammar of Basque

The role played by back-formation processes in the creation of new Basque words is understudied. This paper confirms that back-formation has been a productive means of word-formation in Basque, by gathering examples from both older scholarship and recent studies. Basque has a productive morphological rule for deriving verbs from nouns and adjectives, as in handi ‘big’/ handi(tu) ‘become big’. In some cases, however, a noun or adjective has arguably been created from a verb by back-formation instead. In this paper, we provide several criteria for identifying instances of back-formation. We start with loanwords, where the facts are clearer than in the native vocabulary. We also discuss instances where both a verb and a related noun were borrowed (e.g., bainu ‘bath’/ baina(tu) ‘bathe’) and the existence of such pairs has served as an analogical model for new deverbal nouns.