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.
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.
2022. Compound-internal anaphora: evidence from acceptability judgements on Italian argumental compounds. Morphology 32:4 ► pp. 359 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.
2020. The development of synthetic compounds in German: Relating diachrony with L1 acquisition. Word Structure 13:2 ► pp. 166 ff.
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