Compounding in German and English
A quantitative translation study
German is well-known for its propensity for nominal compounding. This claim is put on a firmer empirical footing by means of a bidirectional translation study between German and English. The difference between the two languages crystallizes in the competition between compounds and phrases. Two complementary asymmetries emerge: first, German compounds are more frequently translated by English phrases than English compounds by German phrases; second, English phrases are more frequently translated by German compounds than German phrases by English compounds. An extension to other word classes shows that the compounding bias in German is not restricted to nouns. It is tentatively argued that the token frequency of word classes plays a role in the emergence of compound propensity. The heavier use of nouns and adjectives in German than in English might be partly responsible for the higher rate of nominal and adjectival compounding in the former than the latter language.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Method
- 3.Translating nominal compounds (and phrases)
- 4.Assessing the rate of non-nominal compounding
- 5.A frequency analysis of German and English word classes
- 6.Outlook
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
-
Primary Works
This article is currently available as a sample article.
References
Ahlemeyer, Birgit and Inga Kohlhof
Andrews, Sally, Brett Miller and Keith Rayner
2004 Eye movements and morphological segmentation of compound words: There is a mouse in mousetrap.
European Journal of Cognitive Psychology 161: 285–311.


Baayen, R. Harald, Richard Piepenbrock and Leon Gulikers
1995 The CELEX lexical database. Philadelphia, PA: Linguistic Data Consortium.

Bauer, Laurie
1978 The grammar of nominal compounding. Odense: Odense University Press.

Bauer, Laurie
1998 When is a sequence of two nouns a compound in English? English Language and Linguistics 21: 65–86.


Becker, Thomas
1992 Compounding in German.
Rivista di Linguistica 41: 5–36.

Berg, Thomas
1992 Prelexical and postlexical features in language production.
Applied Psycholinguistics 131: 199–235.


Berg, Thomas
2000 The position of adjectives on the noun-verb continuum.
English Language and Linguistics 41: 269–293.


Berg, Thomas
2016 The multiplanar nature of frequency.
Glottotheory 71: 1–19.


Berg, Thomas, Sabine Helmer, Marion Neubauer and Arne Lohmann
2012 Determinants of the extent of compound use: A contrastive study.
Linguistics 501: 269–303.


Biber, Douglas and Victoria Clark
Bien, Heidrun, Willem J. M. Levelt and R. Harald Baayen
2005 Frequency effects in compound production.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 1021: 17876–17881.


Deng, Yaochen
2009 A synergetic linguistic study on compounding propensity in technical English.
Glottotheory 21: 54–61.

Djirackor, Yao
1982 Untersuchungen zur Wiedergabe deutscher Substantivkomposita im Englischen. Eine kontrastive Studie. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Hamburg, Germany.

Doherty, Monika
1993 Parametrisierte Perspektive.
Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 121: 3–38.


Donalies, Elke
2004 Grammatik des Deutschen im europäischen Vergleich: Kombinatorische Begriffsbildung. Teil 1: Substantivkomposition. Mannheim: Institut für deutsche Sprache.

Donalies, Elke
2008 Komposita, Derivate und Phraseme des Deutschen im europäischen Vergleich.
Deutsche Sprache 361: 305–323.

Dressler, Wolfgang U., Gary Libben, Jacqueline Stark, Christiane Pons and Gonia Jarema
2001 The processing of interfixed German compounds. In
Yearbook of Morphology 1999, Geert Booij and Jaap van Marle (eds), 185–220. Dordrecht: Kluwer.


Erben, Johannes
2003 Hauptaspekte der Entwicklung der Wortbildung in der Geschichte der deutschen Sprache. In
Sprachgeschichte, Vol. 31,
Werner Besch,
Anne Betten,
Oskar Reichmann and
Stefan Sonderegger (eds), 2525–2539. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Ermlich, Karsten
2004 Zur Wiedergabe deutscher Substantivkomposita im Englischen.
Deutsch als Fremdsprache 411: 206–212.

Fabb, Nigel
1998 Compounding. In
The handbook of morphology,
Andrew Spencer and Arnold Zwicky (eds), 66–83. Oxford: Blackwell.

Fan, Fengxiang and Gabriel Altmann
2007 Some properties of English compounds. In
Problems of typological and quantitative lexicology,
Volodymir Kaliuscenko,
Reinhard Köhler and
Viktor Levickij (eds), 177–189. Chernivtsi: Puta.

Fay, David and Anne Cutler
1977 Malapropisms and the structure of the mental lexicon.
Linguistic Inquiry 81: 505–520.

Fischer, Klaus
1999 Englische und deutsche Satzstrukturen: ein valenztheoretischer Vergleich mit statistischen Anmerkungen.
Sprachwissenschaft 241: 221–255.

Fischer, Klaus
2007 Komplexität und semantische Transparenz im Deutschen und Englischen.
Sprachwissenschaft 321: 355–405.

Gaeta, Livio and Davide Ricca
2009 “Composita solvantur”: Compounds as lexical units or morphological objects? Rivista di Linguistica 211: 35–70.

Greenberg, Joseph H.
1960 A quantitative approach to the morphological typology of language.
International Journal of American Linguistics 261: 178–194.


Gunkel, Lutz and Gisela Zifonun
2008 Constraints on relational-adjective noun constructions: A comparative view on English, German and French.
Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 561: 283–302.


Hilpert, Martin
2015 From hand-carved to computer-based: Noun-participle compounding and the upward strengthening hypothesis.
Cognitive Linguistics 261: 113–147.


Hüning, Matthias and Barbara Schlücker
2010 Konvergenz und Divergenz in der Wortbildung – Komposita im Niederländischen und Deutschen. In
Kontrastive germanistische Linguistik. Band 2,
Antje Dammel,
Sebastian Kürschner and
Damaris Nübling (eds), 783–825. Hildesheim: Olms.

James, Carl
1980 Contrastive analysis. Harlow: Longman.

Johansson, Stig and Knut Hofland
1989 Frequency analysis of English vocabulary and grammar. Oxford: Clarendon.

Juhasz, Barbara J. , Matthew S. Starr, Albrecht W. Inhoff and Lars Placke
2003 The effects of morphology on the processing of compound words: Evidence from naming, lexical decision and eye fixations.
British Journal of Psychology 941: 223–244.


Klinge, Alex
2005 The structure of English nominals. Unpublished postdoctoral thesis. Copenhagen.

Koester, Dirk, Thomas C. Gunter, Susanne Wagner and Angela D. Friederici
2004 Morphosyntax, prosody, and linking elements: The auditory processing of German nominal compounds.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 161: 1647–1668.


Kortmann, Bernd and Paul Georg Meyer
1992 Is English grammar more explicit than German grammar, after all? In
New departures in contrastive linguistics. Vol. 11,
Christian Mair and
Manfred Markus (eds), 155–166. Innsbruck: Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft.

Krott, Andrea, Robert Schreuder and R. Harald Baayen
1999 Complex words in complex words.
Linguistics 371: 905–926.


Krzeszowski, Tomasz P.
1990 Contrasting languages. The scope of contrastive linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.


Kuperman, Victor, Robert Schreuder, Raymond Bertram and R. Harald Baayen
2009 Reading polymorphemic Dutch compounds: Toward a multiple route model of lexical access.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 351: 876–895.

Lieber, Rochelle
1992 Compounding in English.
Rivista di Linguistica 41: 79–96.

Mair, Christian, Marianne Hundt, Geoffrey Leech and Nicholas Smith
Marchand, Hans
1969 The categories and types of present-day English word-formation. Munich: Beck.

Matthews, Stephen and Virginia Yip
2004 Cantonese: A comprehensive grammar. London: Routledge.

Morton, John
1969 Interaction of information in word recognition.
Psychological Review 761: 165–178.


Mühlhäusler, Peter
1979 Growth and structure of the lexicon of New Guinea Pidgin. Canberra: Department of Linguistics, Australian National University.

Pastor-Gómez, Iria
2011 The status and development of N + N sequences in contemporary English noun phrases. Bern: Lang.


Potter, Simeon
1957 Modern linguistics. London: Andre Deutsch.

Roelofs, Ardi
1997 Morpheme frequency in speech production: Testing WEAVER. In:
Yearbook of Morphology 1996,
Geert Booij and
Jaap van Marle (eds), 135–154. Dordrecht: Kluwer.


Rohdenburg, Günter
1998 Subordinate clauses introduced by interpretative verbs in English and their less explicit counterparts in German. In
Kontrast und Äquivalenz,
Wolfgang Börner and
Klaus Vogel (eds), 233–249. Tübingen: Narr.

Sadeniemi, Markus, Kimmo Kettunen, Tiina Lindh-Knuutila and Timo Honkela
2008 Complexity of European Union languages: A comparative approach.
Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 151: 185–211.


Sanchez, Christina
2008 Consociation and dissociation. Tübingen: Narr.

Schlücker, Barbara
2012 Die deutsche Kompositionsfreudigkeit. Übersicht und Einführung. In
Das Deutsche als kompositionsfreudige Sprache,
Livio Gaeta and
Barbara Schlücker (eds), 1–15. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.


Steiner, Erich
2012 A characterization of the resource based on shallow statistics. In
Cross-linguistic corpora for the study of translations,
Silvia Hansen-Schirra,
Stella Neumann and
Erich Steiner (eds), 71–89. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.


Stöhr, Ingo R.
1987 Pragmatic factors and nominal compounding: the influence of „deictic” reference in English and German. In
Neuere Forschungen zur Wortbildung und Historiographie der Linguistik,
Brigitte Asbach-Schnitker and
Johannes Roggenhofer (eds), 31–39. Tübingen: Narr.

Twain, Mark
1880/1997 A tramp abroad. London: Penguin.

Wandruszka, Mario
1968 Englische und deutsche Nominalkomposition. In
Wortbildung, Syntax und Morphologie,
Herbert E. Brekle and
Leonhard Lipka (eds), 242–250. The Hague: Mouton.


Wandruszka, Mario
1969 Sprachen. Vergleichbar und unvergleichlich. Munich: Piper.

Zimmer, Karl E.
1981 Some general observations about nominal compounds. In
Wortbildung,
Leonhard Lipka and
Hartmut Günther (eds), 233–257. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

Zwicky, Arnold M.
1978/79 Classical malapropisms.
Language Sciences 11, 339–348.


Primary Works
German → English
Schirach, Ferdinand von
:
Der Fall Collini. Munich: Piper
2011 (up to middle of p. 98). – English translation:
The Collini Case. Harmondsworth: Penguin 2012 (up to and including p. 105)

English → German
Rankin, Ian
:
Exit music. London: Orion
2007 (up to and including p. 211). – German translation:
Ein Rest von Schuld. Munich: Goldmann 2008 (up to and including p. 253).

English
Christie, Agatha
:
Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple and Three Whodunits. – Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple und Drei Fälle. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag
1984/1998.

Baron, Alexander et al.
:
English Short Stories – Englische Kurzgeschichten. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag
1984/1994.

Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
Egan, Thomas & Hildegunn Dirdal
Heilmann, Arndt, Jonas Freiwald, Stella Neumann & Zoë Miljanović
Kosmata, Eva & Barbara Schlücker
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 february 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.