Debonding of compounds in French, English, Dutch and German
(2014) MGDLT6: 6th International Conference on Modern Greek dialects and linguistic theory — Location: University of Patras, Greece (25.September.2014)
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- Debonding of compounds in French, English, Dutch and German This study will focus on adjectives (and occasionally adverbs) that arise through "debonding" from N+N- or N+A-compounds in French, English, Dutch and German. Debonding is a type of degrammaticalization defined by Norde as "a composite change whereby a bound morpheme in a specific linguistic context becomes a free morpheme" (Norde 2009:186). It typically involves processes such as severance (i.e. decrease in bondedness), flexibilization (i.e. increase in syntactic freedom), scope expansion and recategorialization. In previous studies (Amiot & Van Goethem 2012; Van Goethem & De Smet 2012), it has been shown that the lack of (prosodic) cohesion of French and English compounds facilitates debonding in both languages. This holds for instance for compounds or compound-like sequences with French clé 'key' (e.g. poste clé 'key position') (1) and English key (e.g. key area) (2): (1) FR. Ces deux ministres auraient réclamé, selon ces sources, le poste prestigieux et clé de Christine Lagarde (...) '(...) the key and prestigious position of Christine Lagarde (...)' (GlossaNet, 2011) (2) ENG. The U.S. (...) has said it will do more in terms of intelligence-sharing to (...) stop some of the killings, and really restore some -- some law and order in these pockets of lawlessness that -- that tend to be along some very key border areas. (COCA) Dutch and German compounds, by contrast, are very cohesive, not only prosodically but also orthographically, which is strongly in conflict with the debonding process (e.g. DU. *de sleutel en prestigieuze post, GERM. *der Schlüssel und prestigeträchtige Posten). However, it is striking that Dutch compounds with an intensifying left-hand member (with nominal origin) and -e- interfix often do allow debonding: (3) DU. De binnenstad staat immers op een reuze betonnen plaat (...). 'The town centre is indeed built on a gigantic sheet of steel (...)' (news.google.com, 2011) (4) DU. Echt een buitenkansje voor een nieuw appartement op een klasse locatie.' (...) a new flat at a prime location' (GlossaNet, 2011) It can therefore be assumed that the ending of the left-hand member plays a crucial role in the debonding process. Since Dutch attributively used adjectives mostly end in the inflectional affix -e, the linking morpheme -e could trigger the reanalysis of forms such as reuze and klasse as adjectives (Norde & Van Goethem 2013 (ms); Van Goethem & Hiligsmann 2014). In German, the recent (substandard) use of Hammer 'hammer' as an intensifying element represents another case of debonding with possible influence of the role of inflection: ein Hammerkonzert 'a great concert' - das Konzert war hammer 'the concert was fantastic' (Van Goethem & Hüning 2013). In my paper, I will investigate for each of the four languages how the debonding process is impacted by three different factors: (1) the semantics of the noun subject to debonding, which seems to be restricted to compounds or compound-like sequences with a qualifying meaning; (2) the degree of (prosodic) cohesion of the sequence; (3) the role of inflection. The impact of these factors will be illustrated by several corpus-based case studies. References Amiot, D. & Van Goethem, K. (2012). A constructional account of French clé- 'key' and Dutch sleutel- 'key' as in mot-clé / sleutelwoord 'key word'. Morphology 22. 347-364. Norde, M. (2009). Degrammaticalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Norde, M. & K. Van Goethem. (2013). Emancipatie van affixen en affixoïden: degrammaticalisatie of lexicalisatie?. Manuscript. Van Goethem, K. & H. De Smet (to appear). How nouns turn into adjectives. The emergence of new adjectives in French, Dutch and English through debonding processes. Languages in Contrast. Van Goethem, K. & Ph. Hiligsmann. (2014). When two paths converge: debonding and clipping of Dutch reuze ‘lit. giant; great’. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 26:1. 31-64. Van Goethem, K. & M. Hüning. (2013). Debonding of Dutch and German compounds. Paper presented at the Germanic Sandwich Conference, Leuven, 2013. Corpora: COCA: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ GlossaNet: http://glossa.fltr.ucl.ac.be/ News archives on http://news.google.com
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Van Goethem, K. (2014). Debonding of compounds in French, English, Dutch and German. MGDLT6: 6th International Conference on Modern Greek dialects and linguistic theory, University of Patras, Greece. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/268388