Muriel Norde

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin | HU Berlin · Department of Northern European Studies

Grammaticalization is a well-attested process of linguistic change in which a lexical item becomes a function word, which may be further reduced to a clitic or affix. Proponents of the universality of grammaticalization have usually argued that it is unidirectional and have thus found it a useful tool in linguistic reconstruction. In this book Prof...

This volume is the first collection of papers that is exclusively dedicated to the concept of exaptation, a notion from evolutionary biology that was famously introduced into linguistics by Roger Lass in 1990. The past quarter-century has seen a heated debate on the properties of linguistic exaptation, its demarcation from other processes of lingui...

Degrammaticalization has been characterized as a composite change involving gains in morphosyntactic autonomy or phonetic and/or semantic substance. Such a definition is suggestive of a change (or set of changes) which may profitably be explored from a construction grammar perspective. In this article, we consider two cases of degrammaticalization,...

In this paper, we explore how the process of exaptation can be modelled within a constructional framework of morphology. Assuming that constructions (of varying levels of schematicity and complexity) are organized in constructional networks, we consider issues related to ‘obsolescence’ and ‘novelty’ using a model of morphology that draws on the wor...

The present study examines the fate of the neoclassical combining form pseudo- in eight European languages, belonging to Germanic (Danish, Dutch, English, German and Swedish) and Romance (French, Italian, Spanish). In order to gain a better understanding of the synchronic morphological behaviour and productivity of pseudo- words in these languages,...

This paper offers a state of the art of approximation within the larger domain of evaluative morphology. It provides an overview of the formal means employed by the morphology of different languages to express approximative meanings, as well as a survey of the specific approximative values that can be conveyed. We further discuss the (input and out...

In the present review paper by members of the collaborative research center “Register: Language Users' Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation” (CRC 1412), we assess the pervasiveness of register phenomena across different time periods, languages, modalities, and cultures. We define “register” as recurring variation in language use depending...

The Collaborative Research Center 1412 “Register: Language Users’ Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation” (CRC 1412) investigates the role of register in language, focusing in particular on what constitutes a language user’s register knowledge and which situational-functional factors determine a user’s choices. The following paper is an extr...

Dutch features several morphemes with "privative" semantics that occur as left-hand members in compounds (e.g., imitatieleer 'imitation leather', kunstgras 'artificial grass', nepjuwelen 'fake jewels'). Some of these "fake" morphemes display great categorical flexibility and innovative adjectival uses. Nep, for instance, is synchronically attested...

Libfixes are parts of words that share properties with both blends, compounds and affixes. They are deliberate formations, often with a jocular character, e.g. nerdalicious 'delicious for nerds', or scientainment 'scientific entertainment'. These are not one-off formations-some libfixes have become very productive, as evidenced by high type frequen...

The term ‘adverbial semi-insubordination’ refers to constructions with subordinate word order that differ from regular clause combining constructions. In a Swedish sentence such as kanske att han inte kommer ‘maybe that he not comes’, the presence of the subordinator att as well as the position of the sentence adverb inte ‘not’ suggests that we are...

Dutch features several morphemes with ‘privative’ uses (Cappelle et al. 2018) that allow the proposition ‘a PRIVATIVE X is not an X’ and occur as left-hand members in compounds. Examples are: imitatieleer ‘imitation leather’, fopspin ‘trick/joke spider’, kunstgras ‘lit. art-grass; artificial grass’, lokeend ‘duck decoy’, namaakbont ‘imitation fur’,...

This paper is concerned with changes on the level of morphology in grammaticalization and degrammaticalization. Using data from a wide variety of languages, grammaticalization is shown to have various effects, ranging from the loss of inflection in primary grammaticalization to the development of bound morphemes or new inflectional classes in secon...

Freek Van de Velde's article “Wayward categorial shift: so odd an article” deals with an intriguing construction, whereby the degree adverb ‘so’ and an adjective precede an indefinite article, which is found in several (older) Germanic languages. Such Big Mess Constructions (hence BMCs) differ from canonical NPs because the adjective usually follow...

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 an...

Category change, broadly defined as the shift from one word class to another, is often studied as part of other changes, such as grammaticalization or lexicalization, but not in its own right. This volume offers a survey of different types of category change and their properties, e.g. abrupt versus gradual changes, morphological versus syntactic ch...

Dutch derivational morphology is rich in intensifying prefixoids, i.e. morphemes that occur as independent lexemes but have an intensifying meaning when bound to adjectives or adverbs. A specific variant of these are diminutive prefixoid constructions such as bloedjeserieus (blood-dim-serious) 'very serious' or kletsjenat (splash-dim-wet) 'very wet...

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 an...

Klukkluk was a popular figure in the children's television series "Pipo de clown", which was aired on Dutch national television between 1958 and 1980. In this paper, we discuss two constructions that have been associated with Klukkluk, which we term the "Partitive Qualifier Construction" (e.g. "mij zijn van de voorzichtige" 'I am being careful') an...

Emancipation of affixes and affixoids: degrammaticalization or lexicalization? Dutch is particularly rich in derivational morphology. It features a range of productive affixes and affixoids (morphemes which have a specialized meaning when used in compounds). In this paper we review different processes of emancipation ( debonding ) of both affixes a...

In this paper, we present a contrastive survey of a morpheme originally meaning ‘giant’ in German and Swedish. In both languages, this morpheme has developed into a prefixoid with simile or intensifying meaning. More recently, these prefixoids have been shown to occur as free morphemes as well, and it is the purpose of this paper to explore whether...

t has long been recognized that many instances of change that have been discussed within the framework of grammaticalization studies notoriously defy categorization, for instance because they share properties of grammaticalization and lexicalization (Brinton & Traugott 2005), or because they share some properties of grammaticalization, but not all...

This paper offers a detailed comparison of the formal and functional properties of four expressions of high quantity which double up as degree modifiers in (non-standard varieties of) present-day Dutch: tig 'dozens', massa's 'masses', duizend ‘thousand’ and een partij ‘a set, a batch, a lot’. From a construction grammar point of view, the emerging...

Tracing grammatical change in historical corpora is a rewarding, albeit challenging task. In this paper I will discuss some of the theoretical traps and empirical pitfalls one is typically confronted with in historical corpus linguistics. The historical material may be fragmented, chronologically discontinuous, or stylistically imbalanced, all of w...

Special issue, guest-edited by Muriel Norde, Alexandra Lenz & Karin Beijering

The term “group genitive” refers to all constructions in Swedish where the invariable genitive morpheme is attached to the right edge of complex NPs, instead of to the head noun. This paper focuses on one particular type of group genitive, in which the genitive marker is enclitically attached to a postmodifying prepositional phrase. Drawing data fr...

Scandinavian languages and their dialects boast a wide array of posses-sive constructions, both prenominal and postnominal (see e.g. Delsing 2003a-b; Julien 2005). This paper focuses on the so-called possessor doubling construction in Norwegian, in which the possessor is fol-lowed by a ‘pleonastic’ reflexive possessive pronoun, as in "Kari sitt hus...

‘Subjectification’ is an elusive concept, and whether there even is such a thing as its ‘reverse’, desubjectification, has been a point of some debate. To complicate things even further, both ‘grammaticalization’ and degrammaticalization’ are clouded in definitional fuzziness. The main aim of this paper will be to explore whether subjectification i...

On August 13th, 2012, his 65th birthday, Harry Perridon officially retired from a long career as a senior lecturer at the University of Amsterdam. To celebrate the enthusiastic and inimitable way in which Harry has contributed to the advancement of Scandinavian linguistics, we compiled an anthology of papers in his honour, reflecting Harry’s broad...

This article focuses on the status of degrammaticalisation in grammaticalisation studies. It describes the main similarities and differences between grammaticalisation and degrammaticalisation and outlines a typology of degrammaticalisation changes. It argues that there are three basic types of degrammaticalisation, which include degrammation, dein...

This is a book about degrammaticalization, a rare type of linguistic change whereby grams become 'less grammatical', typical examples being shifts from affix to clitic, or from function word to lexical item. It discusses the alleged unidirectionality of semantic and morphosyntactic change, showing that change is in fact reversible on all levels. It...

From the very beginnings of its existence, the term ‘degrammaticalization’ has given rise to much controversy. Originally coined by Lehmann in 1982 for a supposedly non-existent phenomenon, the term soon came to be applied to a number of different changes, many of which had little in common, if anything at all. But since such ‘counterexamples’ pose...

The study of languages in contact is an ever-relevant topic in linguistics, especially at present times when increasing globalization leads to a number of new contact situations. This volume features ten papers on various aspects of language contact by leading specialists in the field. In these papers, contact-induced change in a wide variety of la...

A striking difference between contemporary East Scandinavian and West Scandinavian is the presence versus absence of the preposition på ‘on’ . This preposition developed from the Old Scandinavian preposition ā reinforced by upp. In the Eastern dialects, the adverb and the preposition subsequently merged into a monomorphemic preposition uppā, which...

Ever since its introduction by Christian Lehmann in 1982, the term ‘degrammaticalization’ has been the subject of much controversy. There has been considerable disagreement about what kind of phenomena the term refers to, and indeed if degrammaticalization exists at all. In this paper I will argue that degrammaticalization is not grammaticalization...

Van een vorm van het PIE woord voor ‘tien’ heeft "tig" zich ontwikkeld tot een PGm woord voor ‘tiental’, dat vervolgens gesuffigeerd werd. In het Nederlands (maar ook in het Duits en in het Fries) heeft het suffix zich vervolgens weer ‘gedesuffigeerd’ en de betekenis ‘onbepaalde (grote) hoeveelheid’ verworven. De meest recente ontwikkeling is die t...

The basic idea behind this collective volume is to probe the nature of grammaticalization. Its contributions focus on the following questions: (i) In how far can grammaticalization be considered a universal diachronic process or mechanism of change and in how far is it conditioned by synchronic factors? (ii) What is the role of the speaker in gramm...

In this paper, I will discuss the penultimate stage of grammaticalization: the stage of affixhood. This stage has not been the object of much study, probably because inflectional affixes are considered to be the most grammaticalized of elements. Having thus reached the very end of a one-way street, they cannot develop any further, and the only rema...

Les langues germaniques telles que l'anglais, le suedois, le danois et le norvegien presentent l'un des plus etranges morphemes : le genitif en -s. D'un point de vue synchronique son statut non affixal semble admis : le -s n'opere pas au niveau du mot mais au niveau du syntagme. Mais d'un point de vue diachronique, l'analyse de son developpement am...

L'A. discute de la relation entre le processus de grammaticalisation et l'hypothese de l'unidirectionnalite (le changement doit s'effectuer d'une categorie lexicale ou moins grammaticale vers une categorie grammaticale ou plus grammaticale) et s'interesse particulierement au phenomene inverse : les changements contre-directionnels tels que la lexic...

Ett centralt problem i forskningen om lågtysk-nordisk språkkontakt under hansatiden är frågan huruvida språkkontakt spelat en roll i kasussystemets upplösning i de kontinentala nordiska språken. Det är klart att kasussystemets sammanbrott var en komplicerad process, i vilket både språkinterna och språkexterna faktorer ingår (se Norde 1997b:27ff.)....

Degrammaticalization, the shift from a more grammatical to a less grammatical status, appears to be extremely rare. Yet a clear example of degrammaticalization is found in several contemporary Germanic languag­es, viz the s-genitive. The s-genitive (as in English the queen of England's power), is most suitably analysed as a phrase-final clitic, but...

The impact of Low German on the continental Scandinavian languages (Danish, Swedish and Norwegian) in the days of the Hanse- atic League has been a decisive chapter in Scandinavian language history. Not only were a substantial amount of words transferred from Middle Low German into Middle Scandinavian, it has also been argued that Middle Low German...