A history of the suffix -(r)ast: morphophonology in conversational speech

The article analyses the development of derivational models with the element -(r)ast in the Russian conversational speech. It produces such words as e.g. liberast < liberal + pederast and means something like ‘a detestable adherent of the thing named by the stem’. At first this element was subject to several peculiar morphophonological restrictions: it was always accented (↓D), it could be attached only to disyllabic (or truncatable) stems ending in -r-. In the course of recent years, the restrictions have somewhat slackened and a considerable amount of secondary derivational models have arisen. But the more the new model differs from the original one, the lesser is the amount of words it can generate and the lesser is their chance to spread in the language.