Die Morphometaphorizität: Die Dritte Wortbildungstechnik. Teil I – Metapher und Morphometapher

Abstract

The article deals with the morphological phenomenon of conversion. I propose to consider a «conversive» word as a morphological metaphor, i.e. a «morphometaphor». A morphometaphor can be regarded as a morphosemantically complex, but morphotactically simple lexeme licensed on the syntagmatic axes of the language system through the indexical function of context. The definition of morphometaphor is tested on the basis of a corpus of 77 languages. Many superficially different phenomena can all be interpreted as realizations of a single word-formation technique. I propose to call this technique «morphometaphoricity».