Shakespeare’s agentive neologisms in suffix - e r and their translations into Polish

Abstract

The present paper is an empirical, corpus-based study of the Polish translations of Shakespeare’s agentive neologisms in -er in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The inspiration for the analysis was Kalaga’s book Nomina Agentis in the Language of Shakespearean Drama (2016), where the author selects 39 Shakespeare’s agentive neologisms in -er . The paper surveys qualitative and quantitative tendencies of translation techniques adopted by nineteenth and twentieth-century translators occurring in the corpus placed against the context of general discussion on the translation of neologisms. A brief discussion concerning word formation processes with the suffix - er in the current and Early Modern English systems of word formation precedes the analysis.