Wannabe Approximatives. Creativity, Routinization or Both?

Norde, Muriel Masini,Francesca Van Goethem, Kristel [UCL] Ebner, Daniel

Wannabe is a versatile word that has found its way into several languages. A univer-bation of wanna (< want to) and be, English wannabe is used both as a noun mean-ing ‘a fake person’ and as part of a collocation, e.g. wannabe-gangster or Elvis-wannabe, where it is often depreciative in meaning. This paper presents a corpus-based case study of wannabe in English and five other languages wannabe has been borrowed into (Danish, Dutch, French, Italian and Finnish). In all languages, wanna-be collocations are productive and show substantial variation, both between languages and within a single one. This constructional variability of wannabe raises interesting questions about creativity and routinization in word formation. We propose an adapted version of the concepts of F- and E-creativity, which distinguishes between F1-, F2- and E-creativity. From the point of view of Construction Morphology, wan-nabe collocations can be formalized as schemas with wannabe as a fixed slot and different constraints on the collocate in the open slot. Our case studies show that these schemas are flexible and open to incremental formal or semantic changes (F2-creativity), which may result in either routinization, i.e. adaptation of existing schemas (F1-creativity), or the entrenchment of new ones (E-creativity).