Wannabe approximatives: creativity, routinization, or both?
(2023) DGfS 2023: Linguistic creativity and routine — Location: University of Cologne (7.March.2023)
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- APPROXIMATION is a concept well studied in various subfields of linguistics, in particular pragmatics and discourse studies, but only recently has it gained attention in morphology. Following Masini & Micheli (2020: 384f.), we understand APPROXIMATION as a complex functional domain comprising FAKENESS, IMITATION, RESEMBLANCE, and VAGUENESS. Examples from word-formation include attenuation strategies in Italian (Grandi 2017), compounding elements expressing imitation/fakeness in Dutch (Van Goethem & Norde 2020), or approximative meanings of Italian simil- (Masini & Micheli 2020) and English (-)ish (e.g. Eitelmann, Haugland & Haumann 2020). From these studies, it emerges that approximatives develop out of a variety of sources, including words meaning ‘fake’ (e.g. Greek pseudēs ‘false’, adopted in many other languages as the prefix pseudo-), spatial proximity items such as English near- (near-identical), degree and quantity items such as quasi- and semi- (quasi-particle, semi-official), or similative items such as English -like (prefix-like) or Dutch -achtig (groenachtig ‘green-ish’). A source that, to our knowledge, has not yet been identified, is modality. Nevertheless, examples are found in various languages, such as epistemic adverbs (English maybe in a maybe-incident or Italian forse in forse-fidanzato ‘maybe-boyfriend’) or volitional expressions (English wannabe in wannabe popstar or German möchtegern ‘would very much like to’ in Möchtegern-Schriftsteller ‘wannabe author’). It is not difficult to see how such expressions emerge – after all, it is only a small conceptual step from an assessment of the truth value of a proposition (epistemic modality) or an aspiration to attain a specific property/state (volitional modality) to APPROXIMATION. This paper presents a corpus-based case study of wannabe in English and five other languages wannabe has been borrowed into (Danish, Dutch, French, Italian and Finnish). A univerbation of wanna (< want to) and be, English wannabe is used both as a noun meaning ‘a fake person’, as in (1) or in collocation with another noun by either preceding (2) or following (3) it, with or without a hyphen. It is usually depreciative in meaning and can often be paraphrased by phoney or fake. [1] Anyone planning this show would come up with a parade of talentless wannabes. [2] Who are the "handlers" of this wannabe spy? / The guy was a wannabe-gangster. [3] This Elvis wannabe finally meets his dream girl. / The writer is a faux elitist-wannabe. Whereas the examples in (1-3) are all references to humans, wannabe collocates with inanimate nouns as well, as in (4). This example furthermore shows that wannabe can take scope over a noun phrase. [4] Vancouver, like any wannabe world-class city, has an entirely unique culture. The categorial status of English wannabe is not so easy to determine. According to the OED, wannabe is a noun when used independently or when it follows another noun, but an adjective when preceding another noun. However, hyphenated constructions such as wannabe-gangster are better analysed as compounds, whereas wannabe in (5) is used in a fashion similar to the suffix(oid) -like (cf. Hollywood-like). [5] yet another piece of Hollywood-wannabe rubbish In the other languages in this study, wannabe collocates with both native and English stems, thus involving both ‘matter’ and ‘pattern’ borrowing (Gardani 2020). As a noun, wannabe is sometimes incorporated into the inflectional systems of the target languages (e.g. Danish wannabe-er-ne (wannabe-PL-DEF) or Finnish wannabe-tä (wannabe-PARTITIVE.SG)). In collocations, we find the same construction types as illustrated for English above, but distributions differ, e.g. the proportions of non- human nouns (cf. Italian wannabe capolavoro artistico ‘wannabe artistic masterpiece’ or French wannabe-blagues ‘lame jokes’). Also, since wannabe competes with other nouns and adjectives meaning ‘fake’ in languages other than English, it occurs in syntactic positions where these competitors are found, e.g. in predicative position (6-7) or as a basis for derivation (8). [6] Ik vind Nathalie zo wannabe. [Dutch] ‘I find Nathalie so wannabe / fake’ [7] ja suomalaisten goottikauppojen vaattet lähes poikkeuksetta "Mainstream", "tavallisia" ja “wannabe” [Finnish] ‘and the clothes in the Finnish gothic shops are almost without exception mainstream, dull and wannabe’ [8] På den anden side virker det uhyggeligt wannabe-agtigt. [Danish] ‘On the other hand it looks alarmingly wannabe-like’ In order to explore the semantic and morphosyntactic profiles of the wannabe constructions we compare 500-word samples for each language, drawn from the TenTen web-based corpora at Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2014), addressing the following research questions: RQ1: How are the different construction types distributed across each language and what is the morphosyntactic status of wannabe in these constructions? RQ2: Which collexemes (nouns, adjectives, NPs) are found in each language? RQ3: How productive are the wannabe word-formation patterns (in terms of type / token ratio, hapax / token ratio and hapax / type ratio)? RQ4: How creative are these word-formation patterns? As to the latter RQ, we see creativity in word-formation as “intentional manipulation of linguistic structure” (Bergs 2018: 290), whereby the hearer can discriminate between creative use, i.e. breaking conventions, and errors, i.e. breaking rules (Uhrig 2020: 1). However, as argued in Hoffmann (2020), when innovations are not conventionalized, they remain restricted to the linguistic knowledge of a single speaker (or a small group of speakers). In word-formation, conventionalization means that an innovative coinage may give rise to a productive schema involving a filled slot (e.g. an affix) and an open slot, but its routinization (reflected by increasing productivity) also implies that the resulting complex words are seen as less creative. Following Beliaeva (2019) we therefore assume a trade-off between creativity and productivity, whereby both concepts are seen as gradient. Further, we agree that even strongly conventionalized, formulaic patterns do not exclude creativity altogether, as speakers have agency over their own individual speech acts (Filatkina 2018: 11, 31), such that even fixed idioms can be extended analogically as ‘patterns of coining’ (Kay 2013). For complex wannabe formations, we argue that they are on the gradient between creativity and routinization, with different positions for different languages, depending on how they are integrated in existing constructional networks and on varying degrees of association with the original univerbated VP (want to be). [999 words] References Beliaeva, Natalia. 2019. Blending creativity and productivity: on the issue of delimiting the boundaries of blends as a type of word formation. Lexis 14. Bergs, Alexander. 2018. Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist (Picasso): Linguistic aberrancy from a constructional perspective. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 66(3), 277-293. Eitelmann, Matthias, Kari Haugland & Dagmar Haumann. 2020. From engl-isc to whatever-ish: a corpus-based investigation of –ish derivation in the history of English. English language and linguistics 24(4), 801–831. Filatkina, Natalia. 2018. Historische formelhafte Sprache. Theoretische Grundlagen und methodische Herausforderungen. Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter. Gardani, F. 2020. Borrowing matter and pattern in morphology. An overview. Morphology 30, 263–282. Grandi, Nicola. 2017. I diminutivi come marche di attenuazione e indeterminatezza. In Balaş, O. D. et al. (Eds.) L’expression de l’imprécision dans les langues romanes, 162–175. Bucharest: Ars docendi - Universitatea din București. Hoffmann, Thomas. 2020. Speakers are creative, within limits – a response to Peter Uhrig. Cognitive Semiotics 13(1), 1-11. Kay, Paul. 2013. The limits of (construction) grammar. In Hoffmann, Thomas & Graeme Trousdale (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar, 32–48. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kilgarriff, Adam, Vít Baisa, Jan Bušta, Miloš Jakubíček, Vojtěch Kovář, Jan Michelfeit, Pavel Rychlý, and Vít Suchomel. 2014. The Sketch Engine: ten years on. Lexicography 1, 7-36. Masini, Francesca & Silvia Micheli M. Silvia. 2020. The morphological expression of approximation: the emerging simil- construction in Italian. Word Structure 13(3), 371–402. Uhrig, Peter. 2020. Creative intentions – The fine line between ‘creative’ and ‘wrong’. Cognitive Semiotics 13(1), 1-19. Van Goethem, Kristel & Muriel Norde. 2020. Extravagant “fake” morphemes in Dutch. Morphological productivity, semantic profiles and categorical flexibility. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 16(3), 425-458.
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Muriel Norde, Francesca Masini, Van Goethem, K., & Daniel Ebner. (2023). Wannabe approximatives: creativity, routinization, or both? DGfS 2023: Linguistic creativity and routine, University of Cologne. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/100935