Sportschau-like, raststättenlike, Claudialike. Like-Adjektive als neues Wortbildungsmuster im Deutschen

Abstract

Adjectives with the borrowed head constituent like are a previously undescribed phenomenon in German. This corpus-based study shows that they occur frequently in certain text sources and analyses them as a productive word-formation pattern. The article describes the morphological, syntactic, graphemic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of these adjectives. While their structural formation is subject to only few constraints, their use is much more restricted. This is shown, among other things, by the frequent use of quotation marks which indicates that writers are aware of the novelty or expressiveness of the formations. Finally, the emergence of the pattern in German is discussed in terms of foreign word-formation vs. grammatical borrowing.