Burning down the phrase and heating up the head: The interjectionalization of German \emph von wegen

While bare prepositional heads usually do not develop into interjections in German, the interjection von wégen is an exception, it traces back to the complex preposition von wegen. In this paper it will be shown that von wégen arose substantially from dialogic language use as a verbal means to reestablish prior speech acts in order to react to them. While its semantic and pragmatic development followed the common diachronic path from a descriptive meaning to a text-/discourse-structuring and affect-/stance-related meaning, its structural development was less usual since it involved the structural reduction of an exocentric phrase to its head. This paper suggests that some aspects of this change might be addressed as head-status change, head-category change and head-feature change