'Fake' morphemes in Dutch. Morphological productivity as a predictor of categorical flexibility?
(2019) SLE 2019, 52nd Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea — Location: University of Leipzig (21.August.2019)
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- Dutch features several morphemes with ‘privative’ uses (Cappelle et al. 2018) that allow the proposition ‘a PRIVATIVE X is not an X’ and occur as left-hand members in compounds. Examples are: imitatieleer ‘imitation leather’, fopspin ‘trick/joke spider’, kunstgras ‘lit. art-grass; artificial grass’, lokeend ‘duck decoy’, namaakbont ‘imitation fur’, nepjuwelen ‘fake jewels’, schijnhuwelijk ‘lit. appearance-marriage; marriage of convenience’. Moreover, the English loan fake is found in Dutch compound-like sequences, e.g. fake(-)bericht ‘fake message’. Some of these ‘fake’ morphemes are extravagant in that they display great categorial flexibility and innovative adjectival uses. Nep, for instance, is synchronically attested as free noun (e.g. die keiharde nep ‘this rock-hard imitation’), compound member (e.g. nepdrankjes ‘fake drinks’), but also as an inflected (example 1a) or graded (example 1b) adjective. Fake displays a similar degree of categorial flexibility, including comparative forms (example 2). (1) a. Dat is geen echte cupcake maar ik vond dat deze neppe cupcake, toch wel op de site mocht. ‘That's not a real cupcake but I thought this fake cupcake was fine for the site.’ b. (…) hoe donkerder je gaat hoe nepper het er vaak uit gaat zien. ‘(…) the darker you go, the more fake it often looks.’ (2) Kim lijkt wel een steeds strakker en faker gezicht te krijgen. ‘Kim looks like she is getting an ever tighter and faker face.’ Namaak is found in constructions that are ambiguous between noun and adjective (e.g. een namaak rieten dak ‘a fake thatched roof’), whereas kunst, fop, lok, imitatie and schijn only seem to be used as nominal/verbal stems and compound members. In this paper, we present an extensive analysis of 500 token samples of the 8 ‘fake’ morphemes mentioned above, taken from the nlTenTen2014 webcorpus (Kilgarriff et al. 2014). First, we present the semantic-distributional profile of each ‘fake’ morpheme, based on a multiple distinctive collexeme analysis, and compare their morphological profiles and productivity. Second, we explore the question whether high type productivity of the morph correlates with debonding and its emergence as a free adjective. Our results will be related to Barðdal’s (2008) claim that there is an inverse correlation between type frequency and semantic coherence of a construction. Thus, we expect that high type frequency of the ‘fake’ compounds correlates with low semantic coherence between the compound members and with a higher degree of bleaching of the ‘fake’ morpheme. Moreover, we hypothesize that there is a correlation between semantic bleaching of the ‘fake’ morpheme and debonding from the compound, as evidenced by its usage as an (inflected) adjective (cf. Norde & Van Goethem 2018, among others). Conversely, ‘fake’ compounds with low type frequency are expected to show more semantic coherence, and would therefore less easily be reanalyzed as free adjectives. References Barðdal, Jóhanna (2008), Productivity: Evidence from case and argument structure in Icelandic, Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Cappelle, Bert, Pascal Denis, and Manuela Keller (2018), Facing the facts of fake: a distributional semantics and corpus annotation approach, Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association 6(1), 9-42. 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. Norde, Muriel & Kristel Van Goethem (2018), Debonding and Clipping of Prefixoids in Germanic: Constructionalization or Constructional Change? in G. Booij, (2018), The Construction of Words (Studies in Morphology 4), Cham etc.: Springer, 475-518. Sketch Engine: http://www.sketchengine.eu
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Van Goethem, K., & Norde, M. (2019). ‘Fake’ morphemes in Dutch. Morphological productivity as a predictor of categorical flexibility? SLE 2019, 52nd Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, University of Leipzig. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/126941