From Landschap to Mindscape: A Diachronic Study of the English Morpheme -Scape

Abstract

Recent academic discussions have focused on a special type of productive bound morpheme used in English word formation, generally referred to as final combining forms (e.g. Prćić, 2008) or ‘splinters’ (e.g. Callies, 2016). One of the morphemes discussed is scape, which was derived from the Dutch loanword landscape. A full overview of the processes that have taken place in the development of scape has hitherto never been given, and the properties of scape have never been compared to the Dutch suffix schap. Based on a corpus investigation, the present study explores in what ways the semantic and morphological properties of the Dutch suffix schap have changed during the development into the English splinter -scape, and how these changes can be explained. A qualitative analysis of the data reveals that scape is the result of different processes, including borrowing, blending, semantic broadening, and reanalysis. Whereas the involvement of language contact in the development of splinters has not been discussed in earlier studies, the present paper argues that the borrowing process was essential in the development of scape as a splinter.