Extravagant “fake” morphemes in Dutch. Morphological productivity, semantic profiles and categorical flexibility

Abstract

Dutch features several morphemes with “privative” semantics that occur as left-hand members in compounds (e.g., imitatieleer ‘imitation leather’, kunstgras ‘artificial grass’, nepjuwelen ‘fake jewels’). Some of these “fake” morphemes display great categorical flexibility and innovative adjectival uses. Nep, for instance, is synchronically attested as an inflected adjective (e.g., neppe cupcake ‘fake cupcake’). In this paper, we combine an extensive corpus study of eight Dutch “fake” morphemes with statistical methods in distributional semantics and collexeme analysis in order to compare their semantic and morphological properties and to find out which factors are the driving forces behind their exceptional “extravagant” morphological behavior. Our analyses show that debonding and adjectival reanalysis are triggered by an interplay of two factors, i.e., type frequency and semantic coherence, which allow us to range the eight morphemes on a cline from more schematic to more substantive “fake” constructions.

Pseudo(-) in French and Greek: Categorization and approximation

“…Pseudo(-)'s morphological status as a pejorative, depreciative prefix or prefixoid (see among others Quirk et al 1985;Van Goethem & Norde 2020) or as a bound morpheme entering neo-classical compositions (Baeskow 2004) or even as a "semi-word" ("semiparola" in Scalise 1990) can be discussed in length. Most cases, where pseudo(-) (and other similar items) appear, are considered in the literature as cases of occasional composition (syntactic constructions), 3 i.e.…”

“…See alsoThillmann's study (2007) for German,Van Goethem & Norde (2020) for Dutch, Van Goethem, Norde & Masini (2021/under review) for eight European languages (Danish, Dutch, English, German, Swedish, French, Italian, Spanish) andCappelle, Daugs & Hartmann (2023) for English.…”

The fate of ‘pseudo-’ words

“…Debonding has been shown to be a relatively widespread phenomenon in evaluative morphology (e.g. Van Goethem and De Smet, 2014;Norde and Van Goethem, 2018;Van Goethem and Norde, 2020). We will discuss it more extensively in Section 3.2.…”

“…simil-marsupio 'sort of marsupium/pouch', freddo simil siberiano 'Siberian-like cold') (Masini and Micheli, 2020) and the productivity, semantic profiles and categorical flexibility of a series of Dutch morphemes with 'fake' semantics (e.g. kunstgras 'artificial grass', namaak-wasabi 'fake wasabi', neppe cupcake 'fake cupcake') (Van Goethem and Norde, 2020). The present study aims to contribute to this growing body of research from a typological perspective, by focusing on a single approximative morpheme that has been borrowed into various languages.…”

“…Besides these typological factors, Van Goethem and Norde (2020) show that debonding and ̶ possibly ̶ subsequent adjectival reanalysis also correlate with the productivity of the morpheme within a particular language. More specifically, their analyses of eight Dutch 'fake' morphemes suggest that their debonding and categorical flexibility is triggered by an interplay of type frequency and semantic coherence, two factors that are inversely correlated (Barðdal, 2008).…”