Die Morphometaphorizität: Die Dritte Wortbildungstechnik. Teil II – Die Parameter und die Skalen der Morphometaphorizität

Abstract

The article deals with the morphological phenomenon of «conversion». I propose to consider a «conversive» word as a «morphological metaphor», that is 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».