Abstract: Starting from the perennial debate over the theoretical status of so-called ‘affixoids’, the present paper proposes a construction-morphological approach to the comparison of nominal compounds in three Germanic languages: German, Dutch, and Swedish. Construction morphology, it is argued, accounts for both crosslinguistic commonalities and differences in these closely related languages, while also taking into consideration factors like genealogical closeness and language contact. Furthermore, the polysemy of empirically attested word-formation patterns can be adequately conceptualised through the notion of a ‘hierarchical lexicon’, while the concept of ‘semantic fragmentation’ offers an explanation for different productivity levels within semantically coherent schemas and sub-schemas of compounding.

Keywords: construction morphology, compounds, affixoids, semantic fragmentation, productivity