Debonding and clipping of prefixoids in Germanic: Constructionalization or constructional change?

This paper is concerned with the debonding of three Germanic prefixoids: Dutch kei ‘boulder’, German Hammer ‘hammer’, and Swedish kanon ‘cannon’. Drawing on an extensive corpus-based and statistical analysis, we compare the formal properties (construction types), semantics (degree of bleaching), collocational properties and productivity of bound and free uses of each prefixoid. We show that debonding of prefixoids is a productive process of lexical innovation in Germanic languages, which may lead to the creation of new intensifying adverbs or evaluative adjectives. In addition, we... Mehr ...