Pejoration in contact

This paper analyses examples of pejoration in the dynamic multilinguals setting of urban German, and their possible Turkish sources. The focus of our investigation is on pejorative functions of m-reduplication (“Cola Mola”). In addition, we discuss usages of “Scherz”/“Spaß” ‘joke, fun’ in urban German, as well as their Turkish counterpart “şaka”, as markers that cancels the performative force of a preceding utterance and can thus bring about depejoration, the cancellation of initial pejoration. We show that the pejoration involved in our examples is pattern-based rather than linked to individual evaluative elements, and account for this as “constructional pejoration”. Interestingly, the patterns we find here are not exclusively pejorative, but can also support such concepts as amplification, ‘coolness’, and ludic aspects, putting a spotlight on links between pejoration and other cognitive domains. We model these links in a network of systematic conceptual relationships and pragmatic inferences.