‘n Morfologies-sistematiese analise van die komposisiestrukture in “vier pogings in linguistiese sinaps-opsporing” in Mede-wete (2014) deur Antjie Krog

By reading Antjie Krog‘s volume of poetry, Mede-wete (2014), as well as review articles written by Helize van Vuuren (2014), Marlies Taljard (2014), Louis Esterhuizen (2014), Jacomien van Niekerk (2014), Louise Viljoen (2014 and 2016), Andries Visagie (2015), Ihette Jacobs (2015) and Susan Smith (2016), it strikes the reader that Krog shows particular interest in the work of the Romanian-born German writer and translator Paul Celan (1920-1970). Paul Celan is a poet and Holocaust survivor from a Jewish family. Although he could speak several languages at a young age, he spoke and wrote German at his mother‘s insistence. Due to a dislike for this language (the language of his mother‘s killers), but also a love for it (in memory of his parents), he creates a new language by using certain techniques to break up words and get something "humane" out of it. According to Krog, these techniques include innovative neologisms and morphological deviations. In 2008 Antjie Krog became acquainted with these techniques during her stay in Germany after receiving private instruction on the work of Celan and translating some of his poems. These techniques impress the reader of Mede-wete, especially how Krog changes and renews words through word-formation processes. More specifically, it is the deviation from Standard Afrikaans that Krog uses in the last section, entitled "vier pogings in linguistiese sinaps-opsporing" ("four efforts in linguistic synapse tracing"). Till now, no research on this process is available. In this study, attention is paid to a morphological-systematical analysis of the last section in Mede-wete based on the morphological analysis and word-formation rules of J.H.G. Combrink (1990:53-58) which include REDUCTIONS (Acronyms, Clippings, Back-formations or Abbreviations), COMBINATION-FORMS (Derivations and Compounds) and other combination-forms like Reduction derivations, Techno derivations as well as Fusions. A corpus of 196 lexical items, as represented diameter, is analysed from a morphological-systematical perspective, but also on a semantical level to determine if Krog was led by certain processes in creating these neologisms.