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Volume 26, Issue 1
  • ISSN 1387-6759
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Abstract

Abstract

This contribution investigates English and German affixoids and their Italian equivalents from a morphotactic, morphosemantic, and morphopragmatic perspective, particularly in the context of verbal aggression. The suffixoid in the pattern , and the German prefixoid in intensifying expressive adjective compounds of the type (with two main accents) ‘intensely poor, lit. blood+poor’ or ‘intensely dumb, lit. sow+dumb’, are examined. Affixoids (both suffixoids, such as +, and prefixoids, such as G. +) are transitional between compound constituents and derivational affixes (prefixes or suffixes), and thus part of transitional morphology, i.e. they are intermediate between different sub-components of word-formation. The issues investigated include the productivity and profitability of the units studied (cf. Bauer, 2001), their relative degree of morphosemantic transparency/opacity, their positive or negative connotations, the degrees of morphological richness of the different patterns, and whether the affixoid constructions refer to humans, animates, or inanimates. A combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses of data drawn from the literature and from large electronic corpora will demonstrate the pragmatic effects of these morphological processes and their preferred co-texts. A contrastive analysis with Italian morphosemantic equivalents will reveal how the three languages differ due to typological factors.

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2025-08-18
2026-04-20

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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): affixoids; aggressiveness; English/German/Italian; morphopragmatics; transitional morphology

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