BLEIFREI, BAUCHFREI, BÜGELFREI: ZU WORTBILDUNGEN AUF -FREI IM DEUTSCHEN UND IHREN ENTSPRECHUNGEN IM RUMÄNISCHEN

The paper aims at investigating German adjectives ending in -frei with regard to their defining features and their actual language use. As it will be shown, the current expansion of such complex adjectives and the speakers’ noticeable preference for constantly coining new and ad-hoc lexemes exhibiting the structure [noun/verb + frei] are a consequence of their fairly complete lack of selective restrictions concerning the first element, their transparent meaning and the influence of similarly patterned English lexemes. The paper further discusses means of translating compounds with the semi-affix -frei into Romanian. The semantically often underdetermined synthetic German words are contrasted with Romanian derivative adjectives comprising negative prefixes, as well as with prepositional phrases or relative clauses which explicitly render the underlying relation.