A grammar of Pite Saami, 2014

10 Derivational morphology
Pite Saami is rich in derivational morphology. While it is beyond the scope of
the present work to provide a thorough description of all the various derivational
processes and of their semantic nuances and productivity, 1 the following
should provide a general impression of how derivational morphology works in
Pite Saami, as well as an overview of some of the more common derivational
morphemes attested in the corpus and extant in the wordlist compiled by the
Wordlist Project (cf. §1.2.3.4).
In the following, derivational meanings are assigned to suffixes for simplicity
in classification; however, as with inflectional suffixes, derivational suffixes
coincide with non-linear morphology when the derivational base is subject to
non-linear morphological alternations. There are many nominalizing and verbalizing
derivational processes, and derivations can apply to already derived forms.
On the other hand, there are only two adjectivizers and one adverbializer.
Nominal derivation and verbal derivation are especially complex because the
semantics of a derived word do not consistently equal the sum of the meanings of
its components. Furthermore, the borderline between polysemy and homonymy
of suffixes cannot always be clearly determined, and the decision whether two
formally identical, but semantically different forms should be ascribed to the
same morpheme or to distinct morphemes is not always obvious. This is reflected
in the glossing standards used here in which most nominalizers and verbalizers
are simply allotted numbers, as in nmlz1 or vblz3, as opposed to more meaningful
glosses such as dim.
In the following, nominal derivation is dealt with first, in §10.1, before moving
on to verbal derivation in §10.2, while adjectival and adverbial derivation are
described briefly in §10.3 and §10.4, respectively. The final section (§10.5) provides
a summary of the derivational morphemes discussed here.
Note that examples in the present chapter include references to either the
documentation corpus or an entry in the database from the Wordlist Project
(cf. §1.2.3.4). Nearly all references to the documentation corpus are for elicita-
1 Israel Ruong (himself a native speaker of Pite Saami) dedicated his entire PhD thesis to verbal
derivation in Pite Saami (Ruong 1943).