The influence of English on Polish morphology

The aim of the present paper is to show that the influence of English is not only limited to the area of lexical borrowing. Non-lexical influence includes, for instance, occasional introduction of the genitive -s, semantic loans, loan translations and morphological modifications. Four English combining forms: -gate, -(a/o)holic, cyber-, e- have been selected for the analysis. The research material for the study comes mainly from the National Corpus of Polish as well as from some earlier publications on new morphological developments in Polish. The morphological and semantic analysis of the four combining forms include: the origin/s of each morpheme, their meaning/s, the type of morphemes they attach to, spelling rules, other information if applicable, e.g. gender, feminine counterparts. The adoption of English combining forms results in the adoption of a foreign word-formation rule that has become productive in Polish.