Deutsche und niederländische '-fähig'-Bildungen: Ein Vergleich hinsichtlich ihrer morphologischen Struktur und Semantik

Abstract

The article demonstrates that the originally German affixoid -fähig also appears in Dutch word-formation products and investigates to what extent Dutch -fähig-formations resemble German ones with respect to their morphological structure and meaning. The theoretical framework for the analysis is Construction Morphology. By means of a corpus study, it is shown that the construction schemas established for German on the basis of previous literature only partially apply to Dutch. While the types of bases are largely the same, Dutch formations often convey meanings that are not expressed by means of -fähig in German. Dutch -fähig-formations can inter alia be described by the schema < [Xi [fähig]Aj]Ak ↔ [corresponding to certain qualities that belong to SEMi]k >, expressing a more abstract suitability relation than their German counterparts. The borrowing process can be analyzed as the emergence of a new construction based on analogy: Dutch -fähig-adjectives are formed by analogy with salonfähig, whose meaning in German is atypical of -fähig-formations but aligns more closely with the Dutch formations.