Evaluative morphology in German, Dutch and Swedish : constructional networks and the loci of change

The separation or ‘debonding’ of prefixoids in informal language use in Germanic and the question whether spelling reflects re-categorization of such compound members as adjectives have recently been attracting increased attention among linguists. This contribution focuses on category changes involving lexical items with an evaluative function, both bound (prefixoids, loan prefixes) and unbound (bare nouns), that give rise to defective adjectives in German, Dutch and Swedish. This occurs via two loci of change: the non-head position in nominal and adjectival compounds and the predicative position in sentence constructions. The diverse items serving as ‘evaluatives’ are unified by one abstract schema for ‘evaluative compounds’ across these languages which is paradigmatically related to other, free uses of such items.