Lexicogenesis, Analogy and Productivity: The Case of -burger

This study deals with the general role of analogy in the formation of new words. Analogical formation has often been regarded as a creative mechanism that is neither productive nor predictable, i.e. non-rule-governed. However, recent studies show that analogy via schema – i.e. analogy based on a set of concrete words that act as model for novel formations – can give birth to productive series sharing the same splinter (Bauer, Lieber & Plag 2013), combining form (Warren 1990, Mattiello 2017), secreted affix or affix-like form (Fradin 2000). More generally, series are part of paradigmatic morphology, which is based on similarity among words, such as beefburger, cheeseburger, porkburger, vegeburger, and others. This similarity may be viewed as the first step towards regularity, or even towards rule productivity. The paper more specifically investigates the evolution of splinters, or word parts in blends (Lehrer 1996, 2007), into more productive morpheme(-like) elements which are available for the creation of both neologisms and occasionalisms. In particular, the study offers a diachronic and corpus-based analysis of -burger, whose development shows the shift from splinter to abbreviated combining form, and, later, to secreted affix and even to free morpheme. In the course of time, the combining form -burger has even developed a slang new meaning giving a number of formations such as mouseburger or nothingburger, whose meaning is no longer connected to the original sense of ‘a type of hamburger’. This development shows how the lexicon can evolve from creativity towards productivity, and from extra-grammatical morphology (Doleschal & Thornton 2000, Mattiello 2013) to marginal (but still grammatical) morphology (Dressler 2000). Semantically, the reinterpretation and metaphorical extension of -burger forms (cf. Sablayrolles 2006) show how secretion can contribute to generalisation and abstraction, thus entailing the same regularity as word-formation rules.