Complementation or competition between syntax and morphology? The case of Dutch binominal constructions expressing positive evaluation
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 ‘that monster of a virus’ show the existence of a semi-schematic pattern [Det N1 van (een) N2] that is subject to considerable variation. The central aims of this study are the following: i. To re-examine this Expressive Binominal Construction (EBC)... Mehr ...
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Dokumenttyp: | conferenceObject |
Erscheinungsdatum: | 2023 |
Schlagwörter: | Construction Grammar / Dutch / expressive binominal construction / compounding |
Sprache: | Englisch |
Permalink: | https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-28624893 |
Datenquelle: | BASE; Originalkatalog |
Powered By: | BASE |
Link(s) : | http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/278577 |
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 ‘that monster of a virus’ show the existence of a semi-schematic pattern [Det N1 van (een) N2] that 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 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 are determined by a corpus analysis of their semantic and formal properties, as well as their productivity in terms of type-token ratio and hapax legomena-token ratio. The corpus study is based on 1000 relevant examples of each construction randomly extracted from the nlTenTen20 web corpus on the SketchEngine (Kilgarriff et al. 2014). The results reveal in the first place that the syntactic pattern is overall more productive than the morphological pattern. From the semantic point of view, the syntactic pattern ...