The Dutch Expressive Binominal Construction in syntax and morphology
(2023) 12th International Conference on Construction Grammar (ICCG12) — Location: Charles University, Prague (19.May.2023)
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- The Dutch een-schat van-een-kind-construction (lit. ‘a treasure of a child’; ‘a sweet child’) has captured the attention of various linguists for decades (e.g., Paardekooper 1956, Everaert 1992, Foolen 2004, Verhagen 2005). Although een schat van een kind is a common expression in Dutch, recent examples such as dat monster van een virus ‘lit. that monster of a virus’ show the existence of a semi-schematic pattern [Det N1 van (een) N2], which is subject to considerable variation. The central aims of this study are the following: i. To re-examine this Expressive Binominal Construction (EBC) by means of an in-depth corpus study, with a focus on four positively-connotated N1s (schat ‘treasure’, droom ‘dream’, pracht ‘beauty’ and wonder ‘wonder’); ii. To compare the EBC with a potential morphological counterpart in the form of a [N1 N2]N2 attributive compound. The examples (1-3) indeed show that the EBC often has a morphological counterpart in Dutch, although this correspondence is not systematic (4). (1) een droom van een huis (lit. ‘a dream of a house’) vs een droomhuis (lit. ‘a dream house’) (2) een pracht van een dochter (lit. ‘a beauty of a daughter’) vs een prachtdochter (lit. ‘a beauty daughter’) (3) een wonder van een vrouw (lit. ‘a wonder of a woman’) vs een wondervrouw (lit. ‘a wonder woman’) (4) een schat van een kind (lit. ‘a treasure of a child’) vs *een schatkind (lit. ‘a treasure child’) The differences and similarities between the various patterns will be determined by a corpus analysis of their semantic and formal properties, as well as their productivity. The corpus study will be based on 1000 relevant examples of each construction randomly extracted from the nlTenTen20 web corpus on the SketchEngine (Kilgarriff et al. 2014). Preliminary results of a pilot corpus study based on a sample of 100 occurrences of both the syntactic and the morphological pattern surprisingly reveal that both patterns differ significantly in their use and productivity. First, in this exploratory corpus study the syntactic pattern occurs mainly with schat (39%) and pracht (35%), and less frequently with droom (18%) and wonder (8%). In contrast, the morphological pattern occurs mostly with droom (53%) and pracht (34%), and less frequently with wonder (13%). Second, the syntactic construction is mostly accompanied by nouns referring to living beings - i.e. persons (33%) and animals (19%) (e.g., een pracht van een vrouw ‘lit. a beauty of a woman’), while the morphological construction occurs more frequently with nouns referring to places (38%) and concepts (34%) (e.g., een droombestemming ‘a dream destination’). Third, the syntactic pattern allows the insertion of an entire NP (e.g., een wonder van Rotterdamse durf en techniek ‘lit. a wonder of Rotterdam daring and engineering’). The latter option is obviously excluded for the compound pattern, which might explain its overall lower productivity. On the theoretical level, the case study will allow us to test the validity of an inverse correlation between type frequency and semantic coherence, as claimed by Barðdal (2008), and to range the set of syntactic and morphological patterns on such a cline. References Barðdal, J. 2008. Productivity: Evidence from case and argument structure in Icelandic, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Everaert, M. 1992. Nogmaals: een schat van een kind. In: H. Bennis & J. W. de Vries (eds), De binnenbouw van het Nederlands. Een bundel artikelen voor Piet Paardekooper. Dordrecht: ICG Publications. 45-54. Foolen, A. 2004. Expressive binominal NPs in Germanic and Romance languages. In: G.r Radden & K.-U. Panther (eds), Studies in linguistic motivation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 75-100. Kilgarriff, A., Baisa, V., Bušta, J., Jakubíček , M., Kovář, M., Michelfeit, J., Rychlý, P., Suchomel, V. 2014. The Sketch Engine: ten years on. Lexicography 1. 7-36. [url: http://www.sketchengine.eu/] Paardekooper, P.C. 1956. Een schat van een kind. De nieuwe taalgids 49. 93-99. Verhagen, A. 2005. Constructiegrammatica en ‘usage-based’ taalkunde. Nederlandse Taalkunde 3(4). 197-222.
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Van Goethem, K. (2023). The Dutch Expressive Binominal Construction in syntax and morphology. 12th International Conference on Construction Grammar (ICCG12), Charles University, Prague. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/105498