Brilleria, Hipsteria, Schlamperia: Hybrid Suffixation, Expressivity and Construction Morphology
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21248/zwjw.2023.2.103Keywords:
proper nouns, foreign word formation, melioration, nomina loci, pejoration, loan suffix, suffix -eria, personal collective nounsAbstract
The paper investigates expressive hybrid formations in German in which the non-native suffix -(er)ia is combined with a native stem. The aim of the paper is to describe these formations systematically for the first time on the basis of a sample corpus, to analyze them with reference to recent approaches to expressive morphology, and to outline the possibilities and limits of a constructional morphological modeling. The investigation reveals that a distinction must be made between two main classes of -(er)ia-formations: (i) (meliorative) proper names for stores (Brill+eria) and (ii) (pejorative) appellative personal collectives (Hipster+ia). The two classes do not behave uniformly in terms of expressivity. An analysis is proposed according to which the meliorative effect in (i) is structurally based but does not occur in every context, while the pejorative effect in (ii) is lexically based and conventionally linked to the word formation pattern. A constructional morphological approach can adequately capture the relevant patterns in the context of schemata, but proves to be of limited value with respect to expressive effects.
