Beyond dance: Inflectional marking on terminological borrowings in classical ballet

Abstract

Most classical ballet terminology comes from French. English and Slovene adopt the designations for ballet movements without any word-formational or orthographic modifications. This paper presents a study into the behaviour of such unmodified borrowings in written texts from the point of view of inflectional marking. The research involved two questions: the choice between the donor-language and recipient-language marking and the placement of the inflection in syntactically complex terms. The main point of interest was the marking of number. The research shows that only Slovene employs native inflections on the borrowed terms while English adopts the ready-made French plurals. The behaviour of the terms in Slovene texts was further examined from the points of view of gender/case marking and declension class assignment. The usual placement of the inflection is on the postmodifier closest to the headword.