Evaluative morphology in German, Dutch and Swedish : constructional networks and the loci of change

The separation or ‘debonding’ of prefixoids in informal language use in Germanic and the question whether spelling reflects re-categorization of such compound members as adjectives have recently been attracting increased attention among linguists. This contribution focuses on category changes involving lexical items with an evaluative function, both bound (prefixoids, loan prefixes) and unbound (bare nouns), that give rise to defective adjectives in German, Dutch and Swedish. This occurs via two loci of change: the non-head position in nominal and adjectival compounds and the predicative position in sentence constructions. The diverse items serving as ‘evaluatives’ are unified by one abstract schema for ‘evaluative compounds’ across these languages which is paradigmatically related to other, free uses of such items

Konstruktionsmorphologie : echt top? Neue Perspektiven auf den kategorialen Status einer entlehnten Wortbildungseinheit

In German, the non-native lexical item Top(-)/top(-) is widely attested in both bound (Top-Sportler ‘top athlete’, Topwetter ‘great weather’) and free uses (top Veranstaltung ‘fantastic event’, Das Essen war echt top! ‘The food was excellent!’). To account for these different yet related uses, of which is the latter is a recent innovation, we suggest a construction-morphological analysis and argue for the concept of a ‘hierarchical lexicon’ with different levels of abstraction. Bound Top- is found to have diverged into several closely linked word-formation schemata over time; its use as an evaluative item expressing a (subjective) quality is paradigmatically related to free adjectival top ‘great’. This evaluative use bears striking distributional and semantic similarities to numerous items that usually qualify as ‘affixoids’, such as Bomben-, Hammer-, Spitzen-, and is paralleled by similar developments in other Germanic languages, e.g. of Dutch top(-) and Swedish toppen(-)

Konstruktionsmorphologie sprachübergreifend: Perspektiven eines Vergleichs von 'Affixoiden' im Deutschen, Niederländischen und Schwedischen

Starting from the perennial debate over the theoretical status of so-called ‘affixoids’, the present paper proposes a construction-morphological approach to the comparison of nominal compounds in three Germanic languages: German, Dutch, and Swedish. Construction morphology, it is argued, accounts for both crosslinguistic commonalities and differences in these closely related languages, while also taking into consideration factors like genealogical closeness and language contact. Furthermore, the polysemy of empirically attested word-formation patterns can be adequately conceptualised through the notion of a ‘hierarchical lexicon’, while the concept of ‘semantic fragmentation’ offers an explanation for different productivity levels within semantically coherent schemas and sub-schemas of compounding

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 explore whether debonding of prefixoids can be fruitfully analysed from a constructional perspective. More in particular, we address the question of whether the observed changes accompanying debonding are best accounted for by Traugott & Trousdale’s (2013) concept of ‘constructionalization’, or by Hilpert’s (2013) concept of ‘constructional change’. To this end, we explore a variety of quantitative methods, including productivity measures and distinctive collexeme analysis. We conclude that the quantitative differences between the bound and the free forms of the three prefixoids studied in this paper allow us to consider them as two separate constructions, but that the distinction is a gradient one

A weak lensing view on primordial non-Gaussianities

Schaefer BM, Grassi A, Gerstenlauer M, Byrnes C. A weak lensing view on primordial non-Gaussianities. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 2011;421(1):797-807.We investigate the signature of primordial non-Gaussianities in the weak lensing bispectrum, in particular the signals generated by local, orthogonal and equilateral non-Gaussianities. The questions we address include the signal-to-noise ratio generated in the Euclid weak lensing survey (we find the 1sigma-errors for fNL are 200, 575 and 1628 for local, orthogonal and equilateral non-Gaussianities, respectively), misestimations of fNL if one chooses the wrong non-Gaussianity model (misestimations by up to a factor of +/-3 in fNL are possible, depending on the choice of the model), the probability of noticing such a mistake (improbably large values for the chi^2-functional occur from fNL 200 on), degeneracies of the primordial bispectrum with other cosmological parameters (only the matter density Omega_m plays a significant role), and the subtraction of the much larger, structure-formation generated bispectrum. If a prior on a standard wCDM-parameter set is available from Euclid and Planck, the structure formation bispectrum can be predicted accurately enough for subtraction, and any residual structure formation bispectrum would influence the estimation of fNL to a minor degree. Configuration-space integrations which appear in the evaluation of chi^2-functionals and related quantities can be carried out very efficiently with Monte-Carlo techniques, which reduce the complexity by a factor of O(10^4) while delivering sub-percent accuracies. Weak lensing probes smaller scales than the CMB and hence provide an additional constraint on non-Gaussianities, even though they are not as sensitive to primordial non-Gaussianities as the CMB