Degrammaticalization of French and Dutch compounds

The poster presents a new research project on degrammaticalization of French and Dutch compounds. Some compounds seem to give rise to syntactic constructions, which provides evidence for the degrammaticalization hypothesis (cf. Norde 2009). This phenomenon can be illustrated by French -clé, which productively takes part in compounds such as mot-clé 'keyword' and facteur-clé 'key factor', but can also be found in recent uses on the Internet and in the press in combination with adverbial modifiers (e.g. c’est un mot vraiment clé ‘it is really key word’), with complex noun phrases (e.g.... Mehr ...