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Debonding and Clipping of Prefixoids in Germanic: Constructionalization or Constructional Change?

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The Construction of Words

Part of the book series: Studies in Morphology ((SUMO,volume 4))

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the debonding of three Germanic prefixoids: Dutch kei ‘boulder’, German Hammer ‘hammer’, and Swedish kanon ‘cannon’. Drawing on an extensive corpus-based and statistical analysis, we compare the formal properties (construction types), semantics (degree of bleaching), collocational properties and productivity of bound and free uses of each prefixoid. We show that debonding of prefixoids is a productive process of lexical innovation in Germanic languages, which may lead to the creation of new intensifying adverbs or evaluative adjectives. In addition, we explore whether debonding of prefixoids can be fruitfully analysed from a constructional perspective. More in particular, we address the question of whether the observed changes accompanying debonding are best accounted for by Traugott and Trousdale’s concept of ‘constructionalization’, or by Hilpert’s concept of ‘constructional change’. To this end, we explore a variety of quantitative methods, including productivity measures and distinctive collexeme analysis. We conclude that the quantitative differences between the bound and the free forms of the three prefixoids studied in this paper allow us to consider them as two separate constructions, but that the distinction is a gradient one.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    There is some controversy regarding the morphological status of prefixoids. Although it is generally acknowledged that they are semantically different from the free morphemes they derive from and may have specific formal properties, several authors have argued that this does not imply that they form a distinct type of morpheme. This issue is outside of the scope of this paper – for discussion, see Norde and Van Goethem (2015); Norde and Morris (2018) or Battefeld et al. (2018), and references therein.

  2. 2.

    Prefixoids with intensifying function in [N-ADJ] compounds are found in all Germanic languages except English. English did borrow über- from German (übercool, übersexy; Van der Wouden and Foolen 2017: 85), but this is not a prefixoid in the strict sense because it does not correspond to a free English lexeme.

  3. 3.

    On the development of affixoids see further, among others, Stevens (2005); Pittner and Berman (2006); Berman (2009); Leuschner (2010); Hoeksema (2012); Klara (2012); Meibauer (2013); Hüning and Booij (2014); Battefeld et al. (2018).

  4. 4.

    Thanks to Sarah Sippach for drawing our attention to German end, and finding corpus examples.

  5. 5.

    German adjectival inflection features three genders, four cases, as well as a contrast between definite and indefinite forms in the singular; and 4 cases and definite/indefinite contrast in the plural. This makes 32 contexts, although many of these forms have the same suffix.

  6. 6.

    Thanks to Roland Pooth for providing us with example (17).

  7. 7.

    Neoanalysis is a term taken from Andersen (2001) and refers to the creation of a “new representation in the mind of a language user” (Traugott and Trousdale 2013: 21), which is argued to be “a micro-step in a constructional change” (p. 36).

  8. 8.

    As the parameters of schematicity and compositionality, as defined by Traugott and Trousdale (2013), are difficult to operationalize in our case studies, we will not use them in the remainder of this article.

  9. 9.

    The corpus is available, after registration, at https://www.webcorpora.org//

  10. 10.

    We quote literally from the corpora, which means that spelling errors have not been edited.

  11. 11.

    Each single token had to be analysed separately, because some tokens had to be discarded, whereas other were relevant to this study. For example, Hammerfilm could mean ‘a movie from the Hammer House of Horror studios’ or ‘a great movie’. Tokens with the former meaning were removed from the data set.

  12. 12.

    Of the first 200 tokens in the sample, only 51 were relevant to our study. This would imply that we would have needed to sift through 4000 tokens (manually) to obtain a 1000 token sample including upper case Hammer.

  13. 13.

    This finding supports Hoeksema’s (2012) account, according to which similes (“compounds expressing stereotyped comparisons”) and compounds beginning with an intensifying prefixoid (“analogical extensions of comparison-based compounds”) belong to the same class of “elative compounds”, and may undergo emphatic reduplicative conjunction in a similar way as regular adverbs of degree (e.g. ijs- en ijskoud ‘ice and ice cold; extremely cold’, erg maar dan ook erg koud ‘very but indeed very cold; really very cold’, zeer en zeer koud ‘very and very cold’) (Hoeksema 2012: 98–99). Since this emphatic construction is available for both intensifying compounds and adverbs, it is not a conclusive criterion to range these uses of kei as instances of either an intensifying adverb or an orthographically separated prefixoid.

  14. 14.

    The examples are from Deutsches Textarchiv (http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de)

  15. 15.

    http://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/rechtschreibregeln/bindestrich#K26

  16. 16.

    They do not use the term prefixoid, however, but speak of an “Adjektivkompositum mit intensivierender Bedeutung”.

  17. 17.

    Note also that, even in simile constructions such as (75), an intensifying reading is not precluded – hammerharte Bässe can also mean ‘very cool basses’ (Lars Erik Zeige, p.c.).

  18. 18.

    The sample does not contain examples of emphatic reduplication (compare the kei examples (43–46) above).

  19. 19.

    An earlier example (1889) is however found in a historical corpus in Språkbanken (https://spraakbanken.gu.se/). Thanks to Henrik Rosenkvist for finding this example.

  20. 20.

    This is a common association in other languages as well, compare French bourré comme un canon, German voll wie eine Kanone, Dutch zo dronken als een kanon.

  21. 21.

    Unlike German and Dutch, Swedish (marginally) allows bound prefixoids with verbs (Ascoop and Leuschner 2006: 246), but these do not occur in our sample. A Google search yields few examples (e.g. vi kanontrivdes ‘we enjoyed ourselves tremendously’ (thailandforum.se › sp)).

  22. 22.

    Other debonded prefixes or prefixoids, e.g. super or skit ‘shit’, do not inflect either. Moreover, there are a few indeclinable Swedish adjectives, e.g. bra ‘good, fine’, or kul ‘cool’. Interestingly, these adjectives can be used as exclamatives as well, just like kanon, super and skit, so it may well be that kanon will continue to pattern with these adjectives and not acquire inflection.

  23. 23.

    Another example of a free prexoid occurring in the genitive plural is kalasers, from the intensifying prefixoid kalas-, originally a noun meaning ‘party’ (Ledin 2012).

  24. 24.

    Generally, kanoners and free kanon can be used in the same constructions, with the same meaning (kanoners/kanon bra ‘very good’, kanoners/kanon dag ‘great day’ etc.), but kanoners is far less frequent in SECOW14AX (1400 raw hits) than kanon (more than 10,000 hits, which is the maximum number of results in Colibri2 queries).

  25. 25.

    The frequencies per million tokens for the lower case forms are: bra (indeclinable): 2138.973; fin/fint/fina: 823.2269; god/gott/goda: 681.9374; kul (indeclinable): 460.0758. The frequencies can be found at http://hpsg.fu-berlin.de/cow/frequencies/swedish/

  26. 26.

    The effect size is given as Cramér’s V, which indicates correlation strength: 0.10–0.30 indicates a small effect size; 0.30 to 0.50 a moderate one, and >0.50 a large one. We used the vcd package for R (Meyer et al. 2016) to compute it.

  27. 27.

    In the raw corpus data (10,000 hits, the maximum), there is only one single example of the simile construction kanonhård ‘cannon hard’, so this particular collocation does not appear to be very productive.

  28. 28.

    Note that we do not have the data for the entire corpus, but use the frequencies in the samples instead. Therefore, these statistics can only be used for comparison of the bound and free forms in the sample, not of those in the corpus as a whole.

  29. 29.

    This spelling variant of jätte can be explained as due to the tendency in Modern Swedish to write compounds as two words (Teleman et al. 1999: 57).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nordeuropa-Institut, Humboldt Universität, Berlin, Germany

    Muriel Norde

  2. F.R.S.-FNRS & Université catholique de LouvainUniversité catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Kristel Van Goethem

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  1. Muriel Norde
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  2. Kristel Van Goethem
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Correspondence to Muriel Norde .

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  1. Leiden University Center of Linguistics, University of Leiden, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Geert Booij

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Norde, M., Van Goethem, K. (2018). Debonding and Clipping of Prefixoids in Germanic: Constructionalization or Constructional Change?. In: Booij, G. (eds) The Construction of Words. Studies in Morphology, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74394-3_17

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