What’s extravagant about be-sandal-ed feet?

Abstract

Extravagance can be conceived of as a (more or less) deliberate deviation from established norms that evokes surprise or attention. In this paper, we present an empirical case study of a rare but quite remarkable morphological pattern, namely German pseudo-participles – forms that look like past participles but lack a verbal counterpart, e.g., be-brill-t ‘be-glassed’ (derived from the noun Brille ‘glasses’). In our study, we investigate the extravagance of the pattern using data from the webcorpus DECOW16A. We combine a detailed qualitative analysis of singleton coinages with various explorative quantitative approaches, taking into account the complexity of the formations and their anchoring in the context. In addition, we examine metalinguistic indicators of extravagance such as double quotes and meta-comments. We argue that German pseudo-participles are a prime example of an “extravagant” phenomenon at the interface of morphology and pragmatics, and as such can be instructive for our understanding of extravagant morphology on a general level, especially with regard to the role of surprise in generating extravagant effects.

“Chaos theory, shmaos theory”: Creativity and routine in English shm-reduplication

“…Based on these characteristics, the pattern behaves quite similar to other "extravagant" constructions such as "snowclones" like X is the new Y or the mother of all X (Hartmann and Ungerer 2023), which also show preferences for some semantic domains but are still open for a semantically virtually unconstrained inventory of slot fillers. Another similarity to these "snowclones" as well as to "extravagant" word-formation patterns like pseudo-participles (e.g., German bebrillt 'glass-ed', see Kempf and Hartmann 2022) consists in the productivity pattern of the construction: Apart from the outliers holy shmoly and especially fancy shmancy with many attestations, most instantiations of the pattern are attested only a few times, or even just once. This indicates that the instances of the construction are usually ad-hoc coinages that are strongly tied to the specific contexts in which they are used.…”

“…Examples include pejorative compound patterns (e.g., German rattenscharf 'great/attractive', lit. 'rat sharp'; Meibauer 2013), doubler-upper compounds (e.g., stayer-onner-for-nower; Lensch 2018), libfixes (e.g., safety-o-cracy; Norde and Sippach 2019), and pseudo-participles (e.g., German bebrillt 'be-glassed', Kempf and Hartmann 2022). Another particularly interesting pattern in this regard is English shm-reduplication, as exemplified in (1).…”

Attack of the snowclones: A corpus-based analysis of extravagant formulaic patterns

“…As a result, snowclones can well be regarded as a subtype of partially filled constructions (as suggested by Sailer 2013), but we maintain that they are nevertheless distinct from other subtypes of the category and thus deserve to be studied in their own right. Finally, as shown at the bottom of Figure 7, snowclones can also be compared to a range of other extravagant constructions: Kempf & Hartmann (2022), for instance, discuss German pseudo-participles such as besonnenbrillt ('be-sunglass-ed'), which look like participles but are not derived from a corresponding verb. Although these examples share with snowclones the fact that they are creative and extravagant, they do not consist of a mix of lexically fixed elements and open slots and are therefore clearly different from the formulaic constructions discussed thus far.…”

“…Extravagance has recently gained increasing attention in the literature, especially in studies on language change within the framework of Diachronic Construction Grammar (e.g. Petré 2017, De Wit et al 2020, Kempf & Hartmann 2022, Baumann & Mühlenbernd 2022. As argued by Ungerer & Hartmann (2020), extravagant expressions are typically characterised by a combination of features, including the use of imaginative and vivid language, but also deviations from linguistic norms and expectations.…”