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Article published In:
The Wealth and Breadth of Construction-Based Research
Edited by Timothy Colleman, Frank Brisard, Astrid De Wit, Renata Enghels, Nikos Koutsoukos, Tanja Mortelmans and María Sol Sansiñena
[Belgian Journal of Linguistics 34] 2020
► pp. 199–212

Pleonastic complex words as functional amalgams

| F.R.S.-FNRS | UCLouvain
| University of Colorado Boulder

Syntactic amalgams are innovative phrasal constructions that combine otherwise incompatible subparts of other constructions (Lambrecht 1988; Brenier and Michaelis 2005). We describe pleonastic formations like flavorize in English and ψηλαφ-ίζ(ω) [psilafízo] ‘palpate’ in Modern Greek as functional amalgams at the word level. We examine these formations through the lens of (function-oriented) Sign-Based Construction Grammar (Sag 2012), arguing that once we see derivational morphemes as signs, and sign combination as construction-driven rather than head-driven, we can describe such words as coercive combinations that serve a variety of semiotic functions.

Keywords: verbalizers, implicit multiple exponence, word-level amalgams, coercion, Modern Greek, English
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.IME in English and Modern Greek
  • 3.Headedness in morphology
  • 4.A SBCG approach to derivational suffixes
  • 5.Functional analysis of IME formations
    • 5.1Word-level amalgams
    • 5.2IME as construction-based selection
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 May 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00046.kou
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