From arch-atheist to archi zinzin: tracing historical and contemporary roots of evaluation and intensification in a set of cognates

2.1 The diachronic development of arch-: a rapid overview

The genesis of arch- as a productive prefix dates back to the ancient Greek combining form ἀρχι- (archi-) or ἀρχ’- (arch-), as is well described in the entry of this prefix in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (arch-, comb. form Meanings, etymology and more | Oxford English Dictionary), which this section is largely based on. In Greek, this combining form is shortened from the noun ἀρχός (arkhos, ‘chief’, ‘ruler’, ‘prince’), which is linked to the verb ἄρχειν (archein), whose meaning is ‘begin’ or ‘take the lead’.^[1] Note the strong conceptual link between initiating something and being a leader: in business and industry, for instance, being an innovator regularly comes with a first-mover advantage which gives one a competitive edge. Greek used this combining form in words such as ἀρχιδιάκονος (archidiákonos, ‘highest-ranking minister’), ἀρχιεπίσκοπος (archiepískopos, ‘highest-ranking bishop’), or ἀρχάγγελος (archángelos, ‘highest-ranking angel’). These were adopted in Latin as archidiāconus, archiepiscopus, and archangelus. In Old and Middle English, several words with (what is now) arch- were borrowed directly from Latin (e.g., archdeacon, archbishop) or from Old French (e.g., archangel, which has retained the /k/ from Latin and Romanic), and existed alongside words with a Germanic loan-translated prefix in earlier Old English (e.g., héah-biscop, héah-diacon, héah-ęngel) – a prefix we still use as a free morpheme in for example high priest, High Commissioner and, more creatively, Grand High Witch, a character in Roald Dahl’s The Witches).

Apart from borrowing entire words that already carried the Latin prefix arch(i)-, Old English also started using the prefix arce-, ærce- or ęrce- as a morphological item borrowed from Latin. The form arch- in later English came to be productively applied to any noun that denoted a title, as in arch-gunner (now obsolete, for an officer in charge of artillery), arch-sewer (a royal banquet overseer), and arch-druid (used by historians only in the 18th century). As a similar development also happened in Medieval Latin and in most of Europe’s modern languages, several of the words with arch- that were introduced into English were adaptations of foreign words denoting the holder of an office or noble title. Archduke, for instance, is a borrowing of Middle French archiduc or archeduc, which itself derived from the classical Latin combining form archi- and dux ‘leader, commander’). The OED notes that many of the words with arch- for an official title relate to positions in the Holy Roman or German Empire (e.g., arch-earl, arch-treasurer). Since the 16th century, arch- was also added, by analogy, in the same sense of ‘chief [role]’ for non-official functions, as in arch-magician, or arch-corsair or arch-shepherd (the latter as a name for Christ).

In Early Modern English, arch- also started expressing the meaning ‘who excels or stands out as [what is denoted by the nominal base]’, ‘leading’, ‘greatest’, used with a variety of agentive nouns as nominal bases: arch-chronicler, arch-builder, arch-defender, arch-critic, etc. Arch- here does not evoke the idea of an official or unofficial title. Rather, an arch-V-er (though the last example given shows there’s not always an -er suffix in the base) in this use is someone who performs the action of V-ing rather more and/or better than others – the OED (ibid.) writes “before others”, which is probably to be taken not in a chronological but in an evaluative sense. Very often, however, paraphrasing with “better” is not appropriate as a paraphrase, unless understood ironically. That is because already in the 16th century, such arch-formations were often used “with terms of odium or execration: meaning, ‘Extreme, out-and-out, worst of, ringleader of’” (OED, ibid.). Early examples listed in the OED are arch-dolt (‘extremely stupid person’), arch-cosener (‘pre-eminent deceiver’), arch-tempter (usually a way of referring to the Devil; cf. infra), arch-plotter (said of the primary culprit of an act of treason), and arch-spy. In several cases, such a formation is or can be used to talk about the supreme devil, that is, Satan (or the Devil) (e.g., arch-demon, arch-enemy, arch-felon, arch-fiend, arch-traitor, etc.). It is the pejorative use that the OED (ibid.) considers the most common one for arch- when it is not used in titles (e.g., also arch-buffoon, arch-charlatan, arch-conspirator, etc.).

2.2 Expressiveness and evaluation

Evaluative morphology has started to develop into a research field in its own right in recent years, with a dedicated handbook by Grandi and Körtvélyessy (2015) having been published already a decade ago. Researchers have pointed out a number of peculiarities of many evaluative patterns, especially diminutive and augmentative ones, which is why evaluative morphology is sometimes seen as a “third morphology” in between inflection and word-formation (e.g., Scalise 1984). In any case, evaluative morphology currently constitutes a somewhat unwieldy domain of research into various kinds of morphological processing. These include non-category-changing derivation (e.g., Italian neutral gatto ‘cat’ vs. affectionate gattino ‘kitty’), compounding (e.g., German Riesenfreude ‘giant joy’, an example of an ‘elative compound’), reduplication (e.g., Italian caffè caffè ‘genuine coffee’; see Mauri and Masini 2022: 132–134), and word manufacturing (e.g., in English and several other languages, the use of the splinter -gate, clipped from Watergate, to label a publicly known event as a scandal; see Flach et al. 2018; Matiello 2022; Warren 1990).

While some of the morphological processes that can be marked as evaluative are quite ordinary, giving one’s appreciation often involves recourse to a form that stands out. Examples given by Zwicky and Pullum (1987) include expletive infixation (e.g., Massa-friggin-chusetts; cf. also McCarthy 1982; Siegel 1974; Zingler 2024) and shm- reduplication (e.g., transformation, shmansformation; cf. also Hartmann and Ungerer 2025; Nevins and Vaux 2003; Spitzer 1952). Unlike regular derivational morphological rules, such expressive morphological processes are demonstrated by Zwicky and Pullum (1987) not to be picky with respect to the kinds of bases they apply to – or not even necessarily to take bases as their input to begin with (as they may apply to inflected forms as well) – to be mastered by different speakers of a language to different degrees of productivity, if at all, and to have idiosyncratic syntactic constraints, among other traits.

Arch- prefixation in English does not appear to exhibit any of these eccentric properties. Let us begin with its input. The prefix arch- is overwhelmingly used with nouns as bases. Any adjectives that appear with arch- tend to be linked to nouns that are themselves already prefixed with arch-. The use of arch- with adjectives, then, appears to draw on a second-order schema. In constructionist approaches, second-order schemas indicate paradigmatic relationships between two or more constructional schemas; for instance, schemas like [X-ism] and [X-ist] are assumed to be connected by a second-order schema (cf. Booij and Masini 2015) – a “schema of schemas”, as Booji (2017: 238) puts it. In the case of arch, we can assume the schema in (1) that emerges as a pattern of analogy.

The item to fill the blank here indicated by the question mark can only be the adjective archdiocesan. This stands to the noun archdiocese in the same way that the adjective diocesan stands to the noun diocese. (The noun archdiocese itself semantically stands to the noun archbishop – as the administrative district under the pastoral care of an archbishop – in the same way that the noun diocese stands to the noun bishop.)^[2] Other such examples are archducal (related to archduke), archangelic (related to archangel), and archpastoral (related to archpastor).^[3]

If an adjective is semantically but not lexically (i.e., morphologically) related to a noun (e.g., belligerent to enemy), we cannot just add arch- to that adjective, even when the related noun is frequently used with arch- (e.g., *arch-belligerent, despite arch-enemy). Surprisingly, though, we do not find *arch-rivalrous, despite arch-rival being a frequent noun. This may be due to the fact that rivalrous is more directly related to rivalry than to rival (and the noun archrivalry is but poorly attested in language use). We find very few occurrences of arch-villainous, even though the noun arch-villain is very common and villainous is morphologically derived from villain. The reason for this may be that villainous has developed too strong an extended sense (‘very bad, nasty, objectionable’) for arch-villainous to be simply understood as ‘of or pertaining to an arch-villain (let alone to the arch-villain, if reference is made to the Devil).

As we will see, there is a now-productive class of adjectives with arch- that relate to political leanings and attitudes to life (e.g., arch-conservative, arch-liberal, arch-reactionary, etc.). However, these adjectives, with few exceptions, can all be used as nouns; when used as a noun, these words (like their bases) can be inflected ((arch-)conservatives, (arch-)liberals, (arch-)reactionaries), which suggests that here, too, the use of arch- with adjectival bases is mediated by the possibility to use them as uncontestable nouns. Indeed, when an adjective is the head of a noun phrase but remains uninflected (e.g., the poor, the wealthy, the faithful), we usually cannot use arch- with it (e.g., the *arch-poor, the *arch-wealthy, the *arch-faithful), as there is no nominal morphological base then. (There is also the possibility, of course, that the semantics of such adjectival bases might not be suitable for arch- to be added to them.^[4])

In terms of different speakers’ ability to use arch- productively, we have no reason to assume that there is a subgroup of speakers of English who have less than full productive control over the use of arch- or, worse, who do not have it in their particular variety of English. Unlike for certain expressive forms of language use, not just expletive infixation or shm- reduplication but also knock-knock jokes, Pig Latin, improvised rhyming, etc. (examples mentioned by Zwicky and Pullum 1987), it seems likely that all competent speakers of English, when prompted one way or another (especially with commonly used arch-prefixed words), would be able to produce arch-anarchist, arch-Eurosceptic or arch-evolutionist, when asked what they might call a rabid, out and out anarchist, Eurosceptic or evolutionist, respectively. This said, one can also safely assume that not all speakers of English would equally readily apply this prefix by themselves.

As for idiosyncratic syntactic constraints on arch-prefixed words, there are none. Words with arch- can be found in the same grammatical contexts as the bases. By this, we obviously don’t mean to say that if the base itself has an idiosyncratic use (e.g., What the devil are you talking about?), we can also use that base with arch-, quod non (*What the archdevil… ?). Rather, words with arch- occupy the same regular syntactic positions as the bases. This stands in contrast to, for instance, shm- reduplication, which can typically only be used as independent clauses (e.g., Freedom, shmeedom!; not ^?*I don’t want to hear about freedom, shmeedom).

Just because arch- formations in English do not have properties characteristic of expressive morphology, this does not mean that they lack evaluative semantics. Admittedly, established words like archbishop, archdeacon or archangel are not positively or negatively connoted, but it cannot be denied that arch- lends a pejorative layer over the base. Consider the following example with arch-centralist, taken from the enTenTen21 corpus (Jakubíček et al. 2013). Negatively evaluative words in the context are put in boldface, and arch-centralist itself is underlined.

In this example, everything is also negatively evaluative, insofar as this choice of quantifier aims to convey the idea that there is no exception to the range of goods and services that the arch-centralists in question would like to bring under federal control.

2.3 Intensification

Turning to intensification, this is an area that has focused on the boosting semantics played by various particles, modifiers, and prefixes, among other devices. For an understanding of the term itself, we follow the definition recently provided by Cotgrove (2025: 142): “the modification of the scalable quality of a lexical item by any semiotic resource, i.e., an intensifier or intensifiers”.

Not all nouns that are prefixed with arch- have a scalable quality (see, e.g., Paradis 2008 for a discussion of scalar meaning from a cognitive-linguistic perspective). For instance, one cannot be a bishop to a higher or lower degree; hence, archbishop cannot be paraphrased as ‘someone who is very much a bishop’ or ‘extreme example of a bishop’. The same is true for archdeacon, archduke, archpastor and some other words in arch- that refer to a person denoted by the base that is highest in rank. This means that when arch- appears with bases that refer to a clerical or secular profession, the higher rank it expresses relative to people who lack arch- in their title may constitute a sort of “scalar” meaning (having to do with hierarchy in titles), but this kind of scalarity is not sufficient for there to be a sense of intensification.

With other bases, intensification is possible to the extent that the noun base itself has, or can be construed as having, a truly scalar property. Consider rival. If A is characterized as B’s arch-rival, this could be taken not just in the sense of B’s most important rival (among other rivals or competitors) but also as a particularly fierce rival (with perhaps no other rivals or competitors to speak of), as when we say that two people (or teams, companies, etc.) “have always been each other’s arch-rivals”. The same observation can be made for enemy. Note also that the adjective inimical, which is related enemy, is scalar (e.g., very inimical), while the adjective episcopal, related to bishop, is not (??very episcopal).

Scalar semantics is even more evident in words such as conservative, progressive, and romantic, which express a person’s political stance or outlook on life more generally: one can be more or less right-leaning, left-leaning, or romantic. Hence, if someone is called an arch-conservative, this does not necessarily mean that they are the most important conservative (e.g., the leader of the party), but rather that they are extremely conservative – indeed, perhaps more so than the leading figures, who might be inclined to make compromises with coalition partners.

2.4 Interim conclusion and reflection

As is the case for its cognate prefixes in other modern European languages, English arch- derives from Greek arkhos (ἀρχός), which meant ‘leader’, linked to archein (ἄρχειν), meaning ‘to begin, to be first, (hence) to rule’. The first words that appeared with arch- referred to beings occupying the highest position in their worldly or spiritual realm, e.g., archbishop, archangel, archduke. The meaning of the prefix in these words is not evaluative (positively or negatively connoted), nor obviously intensifying (as the base has no scalar semantic component).

In the Early Modern period, arch- appeared with bases that were inherently negative (e.g., arch-enemy, arch-traitor, arch-villain), often referring to the Devil. The OED (ibid.) remarks that “in modern use it is chiefly prefixed intensively to words of bad or odious sense”. While we agree that there is intensification and (at least frequently) negative evaluation in the contemporary use of arch-, the latter semantic effect may not necessarily come from the base. Conservatives, for instance, would not consider the term used for them (and which they happily use to refer to themselves) as negative; yet, arch-conservative seems to have a negative, judgmental connotation, as the prefix here implies an extreme or hardline version of conservatism, suggesting opposition to progress out of stubbornness and inflexibility. Such a negative connotation, we assume, is precisely due to the fact that arch- is often combined with indubitably negative bases. The negative aspect of those bases may have ‘rubbed off’ on the prefix.

It remains an empirical question how often arch- is added to bases in contemporary English, how often these refer to actual titles, how often it is added to inherently negatively evaluated bases, and how often it appears with bases that are neutral. This is what we attempt to answer in Section 3.

3.1 Materials and methods

For our quantitative case study, we extracted all types beginning with arch- from the 17-billion word webcorpus ENCOW16A (Schäfer and Bildhauer 2012).^[5] After manually deleting false hits, we ended up with a sample of 66 adjective types (1,796 tokens) and 542 noun types (46,818 tokens). We used word2vec (Mikolov et al. 2013) to gauge semantic distances between the bases occurring in combination with arch-, drawing on the word2vec model used in Hartmann and Ungerer (2024) and trained on a subset of the ENCOW data. Multidimensional scaling (MDS, Wheeler 2005) was used to represent the semantic distances in two-dimensional space; in addition, k-means clustering (see, e.g., Levshina 2015: 218–219) was used to group the data into six clusters in a bottom-up way. The target number of three clusters was determined by visually inspecting a scree plot of the within-cluster sums of squares for different numbers of clusters. Our analysis shares all advantages and disadvantages of studies using distributional semantics in general and word2vec in particular for quantifying semantic (dis)similarities: it allows for a bottom-up detection of semantic clusters in the data, but the results have to interpreted with caution as, among other potential problems, it conflates different senses of the same word, which can of course be problematic in the case of polysemous or homophonous words. As a first explorative approach, distributional-semantic approaches have still proven fairly insightful in previous work (e.g., Cappelle et al. 2023; Hartmann and Ungerer 2024; Perek 2016, among many others), and they seem particularly promising for mapping out the semantic space occupied by the bases that a word-formation pattern combines with.

3.2 Results

Figure 1 shows the results of the semantic vector-space analysis. To keep the plot readable, only bases attested at least four times in combination with arch- are shown. While the three clusters obtained via k-means clustering are neither internally homogeneous nor without overlaps between one another, we can roughly associate them with three major categories of items that tend to combine with arch- in present-day English. The cluster in the upper-right corner contains mostly words from the clerical domain, e.g., bishop, diocese and deacon. In this cluster, arch- is mostly used in its original meaning, not in its more recent intensifying one. Going clockwise to the bottom-right corner, we find a cluster with mostly person nouns with a negative connotation, e.g., criminal, enemy, murderer, nemesis, and villain, as well as supernatural entities like demon and devil.^[6] And finally, the bottom-left corner contains terms denoting worldviews and political orientations, e.g., atheist, conservative, imperialist, or materialist. As we noted in Section 2.2, these terms are often adjectives but can also be used as nouns denoting persons who hold the views in question.

Figure 1:

Semantic vector-space analysis of the bases combining with arch-. Only words attested at least four times in combination with arch- are shown. A zoomable version of the plot with all bases (i.e., without frequency threshold) can be found on the Github page (see Data availability statement).

Note that the clerical cluster in the upper-right corner is less densely populated than the other clusters, even though it contains the most token-frequent instances of the pattern (archbishop, archdiocese). This suggests that while this domain, as described in Section 2.1, is the one where the pattern has its origin, the prefix arch- unfolds its productivity in other semantic domains.

The productive cluster at the bottom left of Figure 1 corrects the otherwise insightful and detailed description of arch- in the OED (ibid.). It becomes apparent that this prefix is very productively used with bases that are not inherently negative. This ‘political’ cluster has two bases that are clearly more frequent than the others: conservative and reactionary. This suggests a semantic specialization for right-leaning orientations (cf. also neoconservative, neoliberal, Republican, Tory, Eurosceptic, imperialist, traditional, etc.). More centrist or left-leaning bases (e.g., liberal, progressive, socialist, Europhile) are rather less commonly used. Their occurrence may either be due to analogy (which suggests some conscious awareness of ‘stretching’ the pattern) or simply be a matter of filling the available semantic space (without the user being fully aware of doing so).^[7]

4.1 Dutch aarts-

Dutch aarts- is mentioned in the Algemene Nederlandse Spraakkunst (ANS), a reference grammar of Dutch, as a productively used intensifier with nominal bases, along with several other intensifying prefixes. Two uses are distinguished. One is related to an entity’s rank and corresponds to the first cluster we noted for English, with aarts- indicating that the entity in question is “the first, highest, or oldest in rank” with respect to the function named by the nominal base (ANS | 12.4.2.1.5 Rang: De voorvoegsels aarts-, loco-, pro-, opper-, sub-, super- en vice-). Examples mentioned are those in (3):

The other use is to form nouns expressing an entity that exhibits a certain inherent or ascribed property to a (very) high extent. According to the ANS, this use involves nouns referring to a person possessing a negatively evaluated property. Adding aarts - to these bases creates nouns whose meaning is then “a staunch, incorrigible (+ noun)” (ANS | 12.4.2.1.3 Versterking: De voorvoegsels aarts-, hyper-, mega-, super-, über- en ultra-):

The observant reader may have noted the odd one out in this list: aartsoptimist. The base in this derivation is not a noun that by itself necessarily refers to a person with a negatively evaluated feature – indeed, in ordinary usage, optimist generally carries a positive or at least socially desirable connotation (someone who is hopeful, cheerful, resilient), while pessimist more often has a negative evaluation (someone who is gloomy, defeatist, discouraging). Note also that the English noun arch-optimist appears in Figure 1 in the intersection of the two clusters with intensifying arch-. Its base is neither inherently negatively evaluated nor related to a political stance or worldview (although being optimistic could be described as a general attitude to life).

In addition to deriving nouns with aarts-, Dutch also allows the productive derivation of adjectives. In contrast to what we observed for English, many adjectives containing the prefix aarts- do not contain a nominal base which is itself already prefixed with aarts- (as in (5)) or an adjectival base for which there is a zero-derived noun (as is witnessed by the possibility to have plural inflection) (as in (6)).^[9] Rather, aarts- in Dutch productively combines as an intensifier with independently existing adjectives which, according to the ANS, denote a negatively evaluated property (as in the examples in (7), all of which are mentioned in the ANS (ANS | 12.5.2.1.2 Versterkende prefixen)):^[10]

Apparently, Dutch has developed an intensifying adjectival use for aarts- which is virtually absent in English. That the adjectival bases must express a negatively evaluated property is not a hard constraint: while it does seem to be the case that combinations of aarts- and a positive adjective sound less idiomatic (Hendrikx et al. 2017: 399 fn. 8), there are also positively evaluated bases that can get aarts- as an intensifying prefix. Positive bases found in the nlTenTen20 corpus include these:

As we noticed for English (see example (2)), neutral and even positive adjectives may nonetheless be imbued with some negative evaluation when they are prefixed with aarts-:

Aartsblij doesn’t just mean ‘extremely cheerful’ but is tinged with something slightly negative: the chant in question is boisterous and almost absurdly cheerful.

Although a fuller investigation falls outside the scope of this study, some of these corpus examples appear in sources of non-contemporary Dutch and may therefore represent a stage of Dutch where aarts- was more productive than it currently is. If it is the case that aarts- used to be more productive – something which is the case for German erz-; see Section 4.2 – this may in part be due to the fact that the sorts of discourse previous generations were exposed to contained more references to titles with aarts-. With the ‘highest-ranking’ use being more present in the linguistic environment, the related superlative-intensifying use may have had more chance to be selected. We can expect that present-day speakers of Dutch, as well as other languages, are less familiar with aartsbisschoppen (‘archbishops’), aartshertogen (‘archdukes’), aartsvaders (‘patriarchs’) and the like. Evidence for this can be found in frequent misspellings such as the ones in (10) and (11), with the combining form aard- from aarde (‘earth’) and the binding morpheme s:^[11]

Such misspellings may be motivated not only by homophony but also by reanalysis: some speakers may treat arch-prefixed words as elative compounds. Such compounds abound in Dutch, for example kaarsrecht (‘absolutely straight’, lit. ‘candle-straight’), muisstil (‘extremely quiet’, lit. ‘mouse-quiet’), pijlsnel (‘extremely fast’, lit. ‘arrow-fast’), schatrijk (‘extremely rich’, lit. ‘treasure-rich’) and straatarm (‘dirt-poor’, lit. ‘street-poor’) (Hoeksema 2012). One indication that this hypothesis is correct is the occurrence, albeit a hapax in nlTenTen20, of aartsjemoeilijk (lit. ‘arch-dim-difficult’), with a diminutive ending to the first part – the diminutive morpheme is otherwise only added to an intensifier in elative compounds (Hoeksema 2012; Norde and Morris 2018) (cp. *hypertjesnel ‘hyper-dim-fast’ *megaatjegroot ‘mega-dim-big’).

4.2 German erz-

In the Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (DWDS), erz- is listed as an affix with two meanings (Erz – Schreibung, Definition, Bedeutung, Etymologie, Beispiele) – the first expressing a high rank, the second expressing (pejorative) intensification, similarly to what we noted for English and Dutch. The dictionary lists 47 different types; among those instantiating the latter (i.e., intensifying) meaning variant, most have indeed a negatively connotated base, e.g., Erzlügner (‘arch-liar’), Erzsauerei (‘arch-mess/-disgrace’), Erznazi. However, we also find (arguably) neutral terms referring to religious groups and political ideologies as bases, e.g., katholisch (‘catholic’) and konservativ (‘conservative’).^[12] Several of the bases in the examples listed, indeed, are adjectival. These also include ones that are not related to such perspectives, e.g., brav (‘well-behaved’), böse (‘angry’), dumm (‘stupid’) and faul (‘lazy’). Observe that, similarly to examples listed for Dutch, these are mostly negatively evaluated.

In the DWDS WebXL corpus, which consists of present-day German web data, erzkonservativ ‘arch-conservative’ is the most frequently attested erz-formation by far (4,721 tokens), followed by erzkatholisch ‘arch-catholic’ (1364), erzbischöflich ‘archiepiscopal’ (1247), erzreaktionär ‘arch-reactionary’ (519), and Erzengel ‘arch-angel’ (145). This shows that, similar to the situation in English, the intensifying use of the prefix co-exists with its use with the original meaning. On the lower end of the frequency spectrum, we find instances like those in (12)–(14), which show creative extensions of the pattern. While erztexanisch ‘arch-Texan’ in (12) can be interpreted metonymically, evoking the features (proto)typically associated with Texa(n)s (e.g., political and religious conservativism), (13) and (14) are interesting in that they use the prefix in opposite ways: In (13), erz- signals an excessive degree, leading to a rather negative interpretation of the otherwise neutral-to-positive adjective süß. In (14), by contrast, the highly positive meaning of sympathisch ‘sympathetic’ is further intensified by erz-, and there are no cues in the context that would point to a possible negative interpretation (such as ‘fake sympathetic’).

Historically, the prefix shows an even higher productivity; while we cannot offer a detailed study here, data from the German Text Archive (Deutsches Textarchiv), which covers the time span from c. 1500 to 1900, show that the prefix combines with a broad set of bases, especially a number of different words referring to stupid, lazy, or evil persons, including, e.g., Erzgrützekopf, lit. ‘arch-porridge-head’, Erztaugenichts (‘arch-slacker’), or Erzlügenmaul, (‘arch-liar’, lit. ‘arch-lying-mouth’). A particularly interesting example is Erzbeweger (‘arch-mover’), attested in a 17th-century text and referring to God, as it is probably the only example exhibiting a purely inchoative semantics.

4.3 French archi-

French has developed an even broader range of uses than present-day Dutch and German. As noted by the dictionary Le Robert, there are again two broad uses, the first to express preeminence, as in archiduc, the second to express an extreme degree or excessiveness, which is claimed to be “used freely to form adjectives”, with the meaning of ‘extremely, very’ (archi- – Définitions, synonymes, prononciation, exemples). Data from the frTenTen23 corpus show a remarkable set of subpatterns. Apart from the “classical” nouns that indicate a high rank with respect to official titles (cf. (15)), a number of nouns are also associated with the most important representative of something non-official (cf. (16)), with some of these being related to the Devil (or a devil).

Interestingly, French has no well-established archi-prefixed noun for archenemy (or archrival, archnemesis), which is rendered in French as ennemi juré (‘sworn enemy’), pire ennemi (‘worst enemy’), or ennemi de toujours (‘long-time enemy’, lit. ‘enemy of always’). Also virtually lacking are nouns in archi- expressing a firm political or religious persuasion – rare cases like archi-néocon are likely borrowings from English. Perhaps due to the fact that there is a smaller base of negatively connoted bases for archi-, this prefix is used more often as a general intensifier (cf. (17)):

The last two items mentioned in (17) are, of course, related to adjectives. French also has several words that are formally indistinguishable from nouns but that are used as adjectives:

In any case, as mentioned, archi- is added productively to adjectives, even extremely productively so.^[14] In contrast to what we saw for English, which hardly uses any arch-adjectives that are not linked to nouns or that cannot be used as nouns, and for Dutch and German, where adjectival bases are common but most often negatively evaluated, the adjectival bases for archi- in French are not restricted to negative ones. It is a pure intensifier in colloquial language use. Some examples are given in (19), in order of frequency in the frTenTen23 corpus:

Its intensifying role may be linked to its susceptibility to extravagant use, for instance in redundant intensification, as in (20), but also in the way it has become debonded as almost an adverb, as in (21), or can appear as a strengthener of non (‘no’), as in (22).^[15] (All these examples are encountered in the corpus data.)