From spearhead to crackhead: Unraveling the morphosemantic development of English -head through a network of constructions

The objective of this study is to examine the morphosemantic features of English -head constructions (as in spearhead and crackhead) through the properties of constructional productivity (CxPr) and inheritance (CxIn), with the particular aim of exploring the transitional nature of the suffixoid -headhum conveying the meaning [+human] (as in crackhead). We argue that, because of the heterogeneity of CxPr, CxIn, and the meaning of nominal bases, constructional schemas formed with -headhum are characterized by dissimilar degrees of semantic secretion, which means that some schemas, such as those conveying addiction (e.g. baghead) and lack of intellect (e.g. airhead), are unambiguously perceived as pejorative units. Based on a constructionist approach, a total of 342 -head units, out of 1,261 matching strings, are employed to elaborate a network of constructions, where the schemas and their subschemas are hierarchically taxonomized. The results of this study show that the -headhum constructions are the most frequent type, with addiction-expressing subschema being the most productive and the most recent one, and where origin-expressing units (as in raghead) are always pejorative. Finally, this study proves that -headhum stands closer to the status of suffixoid, as opposed to other -head forms that do not convey the meaning [+human]. However, the heterogeneity of -headhum forms, and of course their schemas, point to dissimilar degrees of suffixoid-ness, which depend, to a certain extent, on their productivity indexes and their semantic secretion.