Compound worlds and metaphor landscapes: Affixoids, allostructions, and higher-order generalizations

Abstract

This paper investigates the use of German -landschaft ‘landscape’ and -welt ‘world’ as compound constituents. Both occur frequently in metaphorical uses such as Korpuslandschaft ‘corpus landscape’ or Arbeitswelt ‘labor world’. The high productivity of both compound types raises the question of whether [N-landschaft] and [N-welt] form constructions in their own right, both with a collectivizing meaning, and if so, how they relate to their respective higher-order schemas. More specifically, the question arises how the metaphorical-collectivizing uses relate to non-metaphorical ones. As both metaphorical and non-metaphorical reading variants coexist, these patterns show interesting similarities to those semantically bleached compound constituents that have been discussed under the label of “affixoids” in the morphological literature and in recent constructionist approaches. Drawing on synchronic data from the DWDS reference corpus of the 20th century and from the webcorpus DECOW16B as well as diachronic data from the German Text Archive, I argue that they form part of a family of collectivizing constructions. On a more theoretical note, I discuss how the higher-order generalizations connecting this family of constructions can be conceptualized.