Synthetic compounds

With special reference to German

Livio Gaeta | University of Naples “Federico II”

This chapter focuses on a traditional issue of word formation, namely synthetic compounds. The three basic approaches to the question will be reviewed and analyzed with the help of a large text corpus. The latter is of paramount importance for the analysis because dictionaries usually are not reliable for investigating highly productive word formation patterns and especially German compounding. It is shown that purely syntactic approaches do not cope well with the data, whereas a lexical approach like Construction Morphology is able to grasp the fine-grained distributional properties displayed by compounds. Furthermore, the corpus-based analysis allows us to shed some light on the complex network of semantic properties guiding the selective solidarity between deverbal head and nominal modifier by representing argument structure as a bundle of Dowty’s base-roles.

Published online: 28 April 2010
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.311.17gae

Cited by

Cited by 11 other publications

Chovanová, Iveta & Pavel Štichauer

2014. In Morphology and Meaning [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 327], ► pp. 141 ff.

Dressler, Wolfgang U., Sabine Sommer-Lolei, Katharina Korecky-Kröll, Reili Argus, Ineta Dabašinskienė, Laura Kamandulytė-Merfeldienė, Johanna Johansen Ijäs, Victoria V. Kazakovskaya, Klaus Laalo & Evangelia Thomadaki

2019. First-language acquisition of synthetic compounds in Estonian, Finnish, German, Greek, Lithuanian, Russian and Saami. Morphology 29:3 ► pp. 409 ff.

Gaeta, Livio

2017. In Contrastive Studies in Verbal Valency [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 237], ► pp. 328 ff.

Gaeta, Livio & Amir Zeldes

2017. Between VP and NN. Constructions and Frames 9:1 ► pp. 1 ff.

Koliopoulou, Maria

2015. Possessive / bahuvrīhi compounds in German. Languages in Contrast 15:1 ► pp. 81 ff.

Mattiello, Elisa & Wolfgang U. Dressler

2022. Dualism and superposition in the analysis of English synthetic compounds ending in -er . Linguistics 60:2 ► pp. 395 ff.

Naccarato, Chiara

2019. Agentive (para)synthetic compounds in Russian: a quantitative study of rival constructions. Morphology 29:1 ► pp. 1 ff.

Omachonu, Gideon Sunday & Williams Sunday Onogu

2012. Determining Compoundhood in Ígálà: From Universal to Language Specific Focus. Journal of Universal Language 13:2 ► pp. 91 ff.

Riches, Nick G., Tom Loucas, Gillian Baird, Tony Charman & Emily Simonoff

2012. Interpretation of compound nouns by adolescents with specific language impairment and autism spectrum disorders: An investigation of phenotypic overlap. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 14:4 ► pp. 307 ff.

Werner, Martina

2020. Three diachronic sources for the development of -erei-based synthetic compounds in German. Word Structure 13:3 ► pp. 347 ff.

Werner, Martina, Veronika Mattes & Katharina Korecky-Kröll

2020. The development of synthetic compounds in German: Relating diachrony with L1 acquisition. Word Structure 13:2 ► pp. 166 ff.

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