Abstract This corpus-based study addresses evaluative morphology in Swedish. It focusses on constructions with four quantifying intensifying adjectives ( små - ‘small’, stor - ‘big’, halv - ‘half’, and hel - ‘whole’) combined with a verbal base (e.g., halvspringa ‘half-run’). The aim is to explore the evaluative meanings of these constructions in different genres and types of data (fiction, news, social media, dictionaries) as well as the potential competition with constructions involving neoclassical prefixes (e.g., mini -, mega -, mikro -, semi -) and with syntactic phrases including one of the adjectives as an adverbial plus a present participle. The study suggests that evaluative constructions with a verbal base are established and productive word-formation patterns in Swedish, preferably including native adjectives (as prefixoids), rather than neoclassical prefixes. In parallel, there are also syntactic means to express evaluation, whose use partly seems to vary depending on the adjectives involved.
Rosenberg et al. (2025) studied this question.