Morphological and syntactic processes of Noun to Adjective change: the case of Dutch 'luxe'

Koutsoukos, Nikolaos [UCL] Van Goethem, Kristel [UCL]

Marchand (1969) examines possible cases of lexical category change and distinguishes between two different types: (a) syntactic transposition of a word which is a purely grammatical matter and represents a regular syntactic pattern, e.g. government (in the sense of governmental) as in government job, and (b) derivation when a word changes its word or lexical class, a fact which is evident in form and syntactic behaviour and is irreversible, e.g. polar (Adjective) from pole (Noun). However, there are two important questions: (a) whether we can trace a cline between these two cases, and (b) what happens with less canonical cases of derivation, such as conversion. The focus of our study will be on morphological and syntactic processes resulting in Noun to Adjective change, and their analysis from a constructionist perspective (Booij 2010, Traugott & Trousdale 2013). We examine these questions on the basis of the competition between the adjectival use of the Dutch noun luxe ‘luxury’ and the adjective luxueus ‘luxurious’. We assume that their distribution is regulated by inflection, and will check the validity of this hypothesis by corpus data drawn from NLCOW14AX (Schäfer & Bildhauer 2012) and the Corpus Hedendaags Nederlands. References Berman, Judith. 2009. The predicative as a source of grammatical variation. Describing and modeling variation in grammar, ed. by Andreas Dufter, Jürg Fleischer, & Guido Seiler, 99-116. Berlin: de Gruyter. Booij, Geert. 2010. Construction morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marchand, Hans. 1969. The categories and types of present-day English word formation. A synchronic-diachronic approach [2nd edition]. München: C.H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung. Schäfer, Roland, & Felix Bildhauer. 2012. Building large corpora from the web using a new efficient tool chain. Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2010), ed. by Nicoletta Calzolari et al., 486-493. Valletta: European language resources distribution agency. Traugott, Elizabeth C. & Graeme Trousdale. 2013. Constructionalization and Constructional Changes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Online data sources: Corpus Hedendaags Nederlands: https://portal.clarin.inl.nl/search/page/search NLCOW14AX (COW-corpora): https://webcorpora.org/ WNT (via Geïntegreerde Taalbank): http://gtb.inl.nl/