Wannabe Approximatives. Creativity, Routinization or Both?

"Wannabe" is a versatile word that has found its way into several languages. A univerbation of "wanna"(< "want to") and "be", English "wannabe" is used both as a noun meaning ‘a fake person’ and as part of a collocation, e.g. "wannabe-gangster" or "Elvis-wannabe", where it is often depreciative in meaning. This paper presents a corpus-based case study of "wannabe" in English and five other languages "wannabe" has been borrowed into (Danish, Dutch, French, Italian and Finnish). In all languages, "wannabe" collocations are productive and show substantial variation, both between languages and within a single one. This constructional variability of "wannabe" raises interesting questions about creativity and routinization in word formation. We propose an adapted version of the concepts of F- and E-creativity, which distinguishes between F1-, F2- and E-creativity. From the point of view of Construction Morphology, "wannabe" collocations can be formalized as schemas with "wannabe" as a fixed slot and different constraints on the collocate in the open slot. Our case studies show that these schemas are flexible and open to incremental formal or semantic changes (F2-creativity), which may result in either routinization, i.e. adaptation of existing schemas (F1-creativity), or the trenchment of new ones (E-creativity).