Nominant

This paper deals with several issues associated with the Czech word nominant ‘nominee’. (1) Although the frequency of the word has been growing, it is not listed in any established Czech dictionaries. This might cause some problems, since (2) the morphological structure of nominant is misleading, as the word is formed by an agentive suffix but denotes a patient. (3) Furthermore, the base verb nominovat ‘nominate’ is often defined as a synonym of jmenovat ‘to appoint, to name’, which is inaccurate. (4) Nominant has also the variant forms nominand and nominát. Nevertheless, corpus data indicate that nominant seems to be the preferred variant with a rather stable lexical meaning.