meerwoordige

Meerwoordige is a linguistic term used in Dutch to denote a unit of meaning formed by two or more words that functions as a single semantic and syntactic unit in discourse. The concept highlights the unity of the expression, regardless of how its parts combine, and is frequently discussed in studies of phraseology and lexical units.

Origin and relation: The name is built from meer- meaning “more” or “multi” and woord meaning “word,” with the adjectival suffix -ige. In linguistic literature, meerwoordige units overlap with and are often treated alongside multiword expressions (MWEs), idioms, and fixed phrases. The term is most useful when distinguishing multiword units that behave as cohesive single items from freely compositional sequences.

Characteristics: Meerwoordige units can be fixed or semi-fixed in form and may be idiomatic or transparent in meaning. Their semantic contribution is sometimes not predictable from the individual words, though some instances are more compositional. They can show limited syntactic mobility and fixed word order, which facilitates lexicographic treatment and computational parsing.

Examples: Dutch examples commonly cited as meerwoordige units include in de loop der jaren (over the years), met de deur in huis vallen (to come straight to the point), and op het nippertje (at the last moment). In linguistic analysis and NLP applications, these units are often treated as single entries in dictionaries and corpus-based models, aiding tasks such as named-entity recognition and machine translation.

See also: Multiword expression, idiom, collocation, phrasal verb.