Konstruktionsmorphologie : echt top? Neue Perspektiven auf den kategorialen Status einer entlehnten Wortbildungseinheit

In German, the non-native lexical item Top(-)/top(-) is widely attested in both bound (Top-Sportler ‘top athlete’, Topwetter ‘great weather’) and free uses (top Veranstaltung ‘fantastic event’, Das Essen war echt top! ‘The food was excellent!’). To account for these different yet related uses, of which is the latter is a recent innovation, we suggest a construction-morphological analysis and argue for the concept of a ‘hierarchical lexicon’ with different levels of abstraction. Bound Top- is found to have diverged into several closely linked word-formation schemata over time; its use as an evaluative item expressing a (subjective) quality is paradigmatically related to free adjectival top ‘great’. This evaluative use bears striking distributional and semantic similarities to numerous items that usually qualify as ‘affixoids’, such as Bomben-, Hammer-, Spitzen-, and is paralleled by similar developments in other Germanic languages, e.g. of Dutch top(-) and Swedish toppen(-).