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 U+2018top athleteU+2019, Topwetter U+2018great weatherU+2019) and free uses (top Veranstaltung U+2018fantastic eventU+2019, Das Essen war echt top! U+2018The food was excellent!U+2019). 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 U+2018hierarchical lexiconU+2019 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 U+2018greatU+2019. This evaluative use bears striking distributional and semantic similarities to numerous items that usually qualify as U+2018affixoidsU+2019, such as Bomben-, Hammer-, Spitzen-, and is paralleled by similar developments in other Germanic languages, e.g. of Dutch top(-) and Swedish toppen(-).

ISBN:9783823380191

Toegankelijkheid:Open