Bleaching, productivity and debonding of prefixoids

Norde, Muriel; Goethem, Kristel Van

doi:10.1075/li.37.2.05nor

Cited by 14 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…

It is a common process of language change for free morphemes to become bound morphemes, but the inverse process (termed 'debonding' by Norde 2009) is much rarer. Previous studies have found that lexemes with the original meaning 'giant' (German Riesen, Dutch reuze) have historically grammaticalized as prefixes, and subsequently debonded into free morphemes with the same bleached meaning as the prefixes (Van Goethem & Hiligsmann 2014;Norde & Van Goethem 2014). Using a synchronic corpus of written Danish (KorpusDK), this paper shows that the Danish word kaempe, originally 'giant' , is in the late stages of a similar process of debonding.

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mentioning

confidence: 68%

“…This study makes use of KorpusDK (DSL 2008), which consists of a wide variety of published texts (including literature, journalism, and advertisements) from between 1982-2002. All in all, the corpus consists of 56 million words. It is significantly smaller and of a more formal nature than the corpus used by Norde and Van Goethem (2014) in their study of German Riesen. There are both advantages and disadvantages to the more formal nature of KorpusDK.…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 96%

“…Following Norde and Van Goethem (2014), bound kaempe-can in most cases be considered a prefixoid. Affixoids are described by Booij (2009: 208) as morphemes which also occur as lexemes, but which have a "specific and more restricted meaning when used as part of a compound".…”

Section: Affixoids and Grammaticalization Of Original Meaningmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is a type of degrammaticalization; a controversial concept in contexts of language change, which has been claimed to be impossible (Haspelmath 1999). In the recent literature, though, several cases of debonding have been uncovered (Norde 2009: 186ff; Norde and Van Goethem 2014;Van Goethem and De Smet 2014;Van Goethem and Hiligsmann 2014;Van Goethem and Hüning 2015). Morphemes with the original meaning 'giant' (Dutch reuze, German Riesen) have been attested to have debonded: in these cases, reuze and Riesen grammaticalized into prefixoids which had the function of intensification or indication of large size, and later debonded into adjectives or adverbs with this same meaning (Van Goethem and Hiligsmann 2014;Norde and Van Goethem 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Grammar of Giants

Puggaard

2020

Scanstudlang

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It is a common process of language change for free morphemes to become bound morphemes, but the inverse process (termed ‘debonding’ by Norde 2009) is much rarer. Previous studies have found that lexemes with the original meaning ‘giant’ (German Riesen, Dutch reuze) have historically grammaticalized as prefixes, and subsequently debonded into free morphemes with the same bleached meaning as the prefixes (Van Goethem & Hiligsmann 2014; Norde & Van Goethem 2014). Using a synchronic corpus of written Danish (KorpusDK), this paper shows that the Danish word kæmpe, originally ‘giant’, is in the late stages of a similar process of debonding. By investigating the morphological and syntactic patterning of kæmpe, the paper shows that kæmpe has indeed debonded, and occurs as a free-standing semantically bleached adjective, but that it does not yet exhibit fully prototypical adjectival behavior. All three functions of kæmpe remain in use: a noun with the specific meaning ‘giant’, a semantically bleached prefix, and a corresponding semantically bleached adjective. This would argue against an account relying on abrupt category change, and it is proposed that kæmpe has reached its current status through gradual analogy-driven change.

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“…

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mentioning

confidence: 68%

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 96%

Section: Affixoids and Grammaticalization Of Original Meaningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Grammar of Giants

Puggaard

2020

Scanstudlang

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“…Drawing on previous research on noun-to-adjective category changes (Norde & Van Goethem, 2014Pittner & Berman, 2006;Berman, 2009;Van Goethem & De Smet, 2014;Van Goethem & Hiligsman, 2014, Van Goethem & Hüning, 2015,…”

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confidence: 99%

Category change from a constructional perspective

Battefeld¹,

Leuschner²,

Rawoens³

2018

Constructional Approaches to Language

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In languages with productive compounding like German, Dutch and Swedish, 'evaluative morphology' (cf. Bauer, 1997) raises intriguing issues of category status and change. The present contribution addresses category changes involving 'expressive compounds' (Meibauer, 2013) such as G. Hammerauftritt 'lit. hammer, i.e. great performance' or Mistwetter 'lit. dung, i.e. terrible weather', in which the nominal non-head has an evaluative function. The same morphemes, which we will henceforth refer to as 'evaluatives', can sometimes function as adjective intensifiers (G. hammerschön 'very pretty') and, more importantly, display free uses (G. hammer 'great, excellent', mist 'terrible, awful') which seem to be the result of recategorization from noun to adjective. The adjective status is not clear-cut, however, given that the general lack of inflection in the relevant grammatical contexts makes it difficult to unequivocally identify adjectival behaviour. We will therefore argue (i) that discrete categories in the highly dynamic domain of evaluative morphology in Germanic cannot be maintained, and (ii) that the emergence of new (defective) adjectives expressing evaluation should be seen as a productive process. Two loci of change prove crucial in this context: the non-head position of compounds and the predicative position.

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Elative Compounds

Hoeksema

2023

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Morphology

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Elative compounds, also known as intensifier compounds, serve to intensify scalar adjectives in an idiomatic and often colourful way. They may give rise to prefixoids by analogical extension. Several semantic subtypes are distinguished: (i) simile‐based compounds ( rock hard = hard as a rock ), (ii) resultative compounds (German sterbenslangweilig ‘die‐boring = boring to death’ and (iii) taboo‐based compounds (Dutch pisnijdig ‘piss angry’). Elative compounds are extreme adjectives, a class of adjectives associated with extremes of a scale, much like non‐compound adjectives such as gorgeous, magnificent, fantastic . When there are several elative compounds of an adjective, the compounds are semantically more specialized than the adjective (and so serve to disambiguate polysemy) and are differentiated in the constructions in which they appear. Elative compounds may undergo further derivation, but they rarely do so. A possible link is proposed with the extreme adjective status of elative compounds. Throughout this entry, comparisons are made between elative compounding and other ways to intensify adjectives.

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Bleaching, productivity and debonding of prefixoids

Cited by 14 publications

References 16 publications

Grammar of Giants

Grammar of Giants

Category change from a constructional perspective

Elative Compounds

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