Dutch features several morphemes with “privative” semantics that occur as left-hand members in compounds (e.g. imitatieleer ‘imitation leather’, kunstgras ‘artificial grass’, nepjuwelen ‘fake jewels’). Additionally, the English loan fake can be used in Dutch compound-like sequences (e.g. fake-bericht ‘fake message’). Some of these “fake” morphemes display great categorical flexibility and innovative adjectival uses. Nep, for instance, is synchronically attested as an inflected adjective (1), and fake may be used in the Dutch comparative form (2). (1) 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.’ (2) Kim lijkt wel een steeds strakker en faker gezicht te krijgen. ‘Kim looks like she is getting an ever tighter and faker face.’ In this study, we combine an extensive corpus analysis of eight Dutch “fake” morphemes with statistical methods in distributional semantics and collexeme analysis in order to compare their semantic and morphological properties and to find out which factors are the driving forces behind their exceptional “extravagant” morphological behaviour. Our analyses show that debonding and adjectival reanalysis are triggered by an interplay of two factors, i.e. type frequency and semantic coherence, which allow us to range the eight morphemes on a cline from more schematic to more substantive “fake” constructions.