From Noun to Evaluative Adjective: Conversion or Debonding? Dutch<i>Top</i>and Its Equivalents in German

Goethem, Kristel Van; Hüning, Matthias

doi:10.1017/s1470542715000112

Cited by 9 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Such developments may not be that common in syntax, but they are very common in morphology. For example, a compound may be reinterpreted as an affixoid plus a host, after which the affixoid becomes productive and possibly turns into an affix or, through debonding, into an adjective (de Vries 1920-1922, Booij 2010, Van Goethem & Hüning 2015.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Degree Resultatives as Second-Order Constructions

Hoeksema

Napoli

2019

J Ger Ling

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Resultatives in English and Dutch have developed special degree readings. These readings stem from a reinterpretation of the resultative predicate as indicating a high degree rather than an actual result. For example, when a parent saysI love youtodeath, one need not call the cops, since the sentence is not about love turning lethal, but merely indicative of a high degree of affection. Such cases have often been noted in the literature as idiomatic, but this view ignores the fact that these are not isolated cases but productive constructions that can be used with a variety of verbs. We explore various resultative constructions in English and Dutch, and give a classification of the subtypes involved as well as their diachronic development from ordinary to degree interpretation. We link these subtypes to lexical semantic classes of verbs. Both English and Dutch show a steady growth in the lexical and structural diversity of degree resultatives throughout the early modern and contemporary periods (1600-2000). We focus in our paper on the period 1800-2000, for which we did an extensive corpus study using the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and Delpher (a collection of digitized Dutch newspapers, journals, magazines, and other resources). One of our findings is that, similar to other types of expressive language, such as degree modification and emphatic negation, taboo expressions play a role in degree resultatives; in fact, their role is excessive. We outline a number of the commonalities among the semantic domains of expressive language used in resultatives.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Degree Resultatives as Second-Order Constructions

Hoeksema

Napoli

2019

J Ger Ling

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“…Several studies have demonstrated that debonding of intensifying prefixoids is a creative process of lexical innovation in Germanic languages, which may lead to the emergence of new intensifying adverbs or evaluative adjectives (cf. Battefeld et al 2018;Norde and Van Goethem 2014Van Goethem and De Smet 2014;Van Goethem and Hiligsmann 2014;Van Goethem and Hüning 2015). The present paper investigates to which extent the adjectival or adverbial uses of Dutch morphemes with "fake" semantics may be considered instances of debonding.…”

Section: Debondingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Goethem

Norde

2020

Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory

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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.

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“…There are also a number of other examples in the literature of prefixoids debonding into adjectives (e.g. Norde 2009;Van Goethem and De Smet 2014;Van Goethem and Hüning 2015;Battefeld et al 2018).…”

Section: Debondingmentioning

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%

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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From Noun to Evaluative Adjective: Conversion or Debonding? DutchTopand Its Equivalents in German

Cited by 9 publications

References 18 publications

Degree Resultatives as Second-Order Constructions

Degree Resultatives as Second-Order Constructions

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

Grammar of Giants

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