Philipps-Universität Marburg

Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik

PS: Morphology and Syntax

SS 2007

A linguistic analysis of the

word forming element

pseudo-

by

Sandra Thillmann

LA: Englisch, Sport

Semester: 4

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Table of contents

1

INTRODUCTION 3

2

METHODOLOGY 3

3

MEANING AND ORIGIN 5

4

PROPERTIES 5

4.1

Morphological and syntactic properties 5

4.2

Phonological properties 7

4.3

Semantic properties 8

5

MORPHOLOGICAL STATUS 9

6

TRANSPARENCY 10

7

FREQUENCY AND PRODUCTIVITY 11

8

COMPARISONS, RIVALLING ELEMENTS 13

9

CONCLUSION 14

BIBLIOGRAPHY 15

APPENDIX (DATA FROM DWDS AND GOOGLE) 16

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1 Introduction

In this term-paper I will examine the German word-forming element

pseudo-/Pseudo-

in order to find out about its meaning and function, its properties but also about its

transparency and productivity.

First of all I describe the procedure of collecting data and go into some essential basics.

I will handle this in chapter two: Methodology. In chapter three I highlight meaning and

origin of the element with information from dictionaries. Chapter four is about the dif-

ferent properties of

pseudo-

. The subparagraph "morphological and syntactic proper-

ties" deals with the classification of morphemes according to Kortmann but also with

the lexical category of the base and with the finding of particular suffixes. The phono-

logical properties offer an analysis concerning syllables, stress pattern and pronuncia-

tion whereas the semantic properties is about

pseudo-

as an pejorative prefix. Chapter

five is called "morphological status" and here I make a discussion about combining

forms. In chapter six "transparency", I define this term and describe how transparent

the element is. The chapter of frequency and productivity (Chapter 7) is about how of-

ten the element occurs and from this it follows a debate about its productivity rate. In

the last chapter I compare

pseudo-

with

möchtegern-

and analyze it concerning a certain

rivalry between the two morphemes.

2 Methodology

The analysis of the element

pseudo-

is based on the data collection of several corpora. I

used the online dictionary and linguistic data base DWDS (

Das Digitale Wörterbuch

der deutschen Sprache des 20. Jh.

). One of the eight corpora that the DWDS provides is

called

Corpus Berliner Zeitung.

This corpus contains all online articles that have been

appeared in the

Berliner Zeitung

from 3.1.1994 to 31.12.2005. It′s scale is about 252

million tokens in 869.000 articles.

I searched for

pseudo*

and I got 9 pages full of different

pseudo-

combinations. I tried

to sort out the words that were not useful regarding to my analysis. Therefore I elimi-

nated proper nouns or word formations that are well-established. For example

pseudois-

idorische Dekretalen

(kirchenrechtliche Fälschungen) or

pseudocýperus

(Pflanzen-

name). I put the words that can be found in a dictionary in brackets and therefore I did

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not include them in my analysis because dictionary words are not useable concerning an

analysis of neologism.

There was no indication for frequency or productivity so I had to count the word forma-

tions that occurred more than once. I collected all the data and put them in a table or-

dered by the year of first publication. The DWDS-corpus is case-sensitive and distin-

guishes between upper and lower case. So I made a new search and typed in

Pseudo*

because I wanted to ensure that substantives were also taken into consideration in my

analysis. Here I had to separate the words, too. Again I eliminated proper nouns and

well-established words for example

Pseudokrupp

or

Pseudonym. Pseudonym

is of

course a

pseudo-

word formation but not a new one. So I eliminated it due to the fact

that I want to concentrate on neologisms.

Another source to find data is the world wide web. I typed in

pseudo*

in the search box

of www.google.de and I got lots of word formations with

pseudo.

I took the first 25

words that were useable and eliminated as stated above proper nouns, formations that

are already registered in a dictionary or words which did not seem very useful to me.

Later I extended my list up to 50 words to stabilize data and the analysis out of it.

I did not eliminate the word formation

Pseudowissenschaft(lich)

because I figured it out

too late that this is a dictionary-registered word formation. So I did not want to elimi-

nate it after thinking about it and after including it into my analysis. I just put it in

brackets to make clear that it is not a matter of neologism.

To clean up my crawled data completely, I corrected the inflections. I changed

pseudo-

politischen (Skandal)

into

pseudopolitisch

for example.

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3 Meaning and origin

In common parlance one can say that >pseudo-< is an determinative element of

compounds with the meaning "false, spurious, simulated" (cf. Duden,

Herkunftswörterbuch) or it is used to mark something as false, fraudulent, or pretending

to be what is denoted by the following word. In Webster′s Dictionary (cf. Merriam

2002:45) the element >pseudo-> occurs in the 15th century (Middle English). It has

derived from Late Latin

pseud-, pseudo-,

and from Greek

pseudes, pseudein

, (to

lie, cheat, falsify) so it is a foreign word. >pseudo-< has got several meanings, but there

is not much of a difference in the particular meanings:

1.

false:

a)

sham, feigned, fake: >pseudodramatic< >pseudoserious<

b)

counterfeit, spurious >pseudoantique<

c)

quack >pseudoanalyst<

d)

fictitious >pseudobiography<

e)

unreal, illusory >pseudohallucination<

2.

a)

substance deceptively resembling (a specified thing) >pseudomalachite<

b)

temporary or substitute formation similar to (a specified thing) >pseudo-

branchia< >pseudopodium<

3.

a)

chemical compound resembling, isomeric with, or related to (a specified

compound) >pseudocumene<

4.

a)

abnormal, aberrant >pseudarthrosis< >pseudembryo< >pseu- dovum<

4 Properties

4.1

Morphological and syntactic properties

To search out to which kind of affix

pseudo-

belongs to I found a classification system

in Kortmann (2005: 86). He classifies morphemes according to the three criteria

auton-

omy, function/meaning

and

position

. Running through theses criteria with the affix

pseudo-

we can figure out that

pseudo-

must be a prefix. In the criteria of autonomy

pseudo-

must be a bound morpheme because

pseudo-

cannot stand alone. It always

needs to be attached to another morpheme. Now in reference to the criteria of func-

tion/meaning Kortmann distinguishes between derivational and inflectional affixes. In

our case it must be an derivational affix because

pseudo-

does not produce word forms

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but creates new lexemes via affixation. These lexemes have always the meaning as

stated above. After discussing the function one has to decide whether the derivational

affix is a prefix or suffix.

Pseudo-

is always attached in front of the base so it must be a

prefix.

The lexical categories of the attached bases and the derived word are either nouns or

adjectives (cf. Stein 2007). I got this information from different dictionaries but also by

taking a closer look to the data. Here only nouns and adjectives were found. In the

"Berliner Zeitung" corpus I found 323 nouns whereas the google-results emerged 40

nouns. A tendency to noun-formations is clearly visible because in contrast the "Ber-

liner Zeitung" corpus had only 196 adjective-formations and google offers just ten.

I thought about verbs and asked myself why a verb cannot be attached to

pseudo-.

I

tried to think for some word formations with a verb and so I had for example

pseudo-

singen

and

pseudotanzen

in my mind. These words sound quite correct to me but I real-

ized that I cannot form a sentence with the new verb-formation. Every sentence that

came into my mind made a adjective or a noun out of the verb. No one would say "Wir

pseudotanzten im Raum.", but "Wir tanzten pseudomäßig im Raum.". I changed the

verb automatically in a noun (

das Pseudotanzen

) or in an adjective (

pseudotanzend

). So

the assumption that

pseudo-

can be attached to a verb was eliminated.

Particular attention should be given to the conspicuous observation that the endings of

some bases accord with each other. In the corpus "Berliner Zeitung" for example we

can find 84 bases with the suffix

­isch.

This suffix is part of the most common suffixes

in the adjective formation as it is defined in the online dictionary and grammar of ger-

man "canoo.net". Besides -

isch

there are two other suffixes that belong to the most pro-

ductive adjective suffixes in german present-day language:

-lich

and

­ig

(cf. Fleischer

(1969: 244))

.

The numerous occurrence of these suffixes is another evidence for the

attachment of adjectives to our word forming element

pseudo-

.

Other suffixes of adjective formations that I found in the data are for example:

- lich (occurs 15 times)

- ig (occurs 10 times)

- är (occurs 6 times)

- ell (occurs 8 times)

- iv (occurs 11 times)

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