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15 - The Role of Word-Formation Families and Subfamilies in the Organization of German Diminutive Compounds

from Part III - Corpus-Based Case Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2020

By
Wolfgang U. Dressler ,
Sonja Schwaiger  and
Jutta Ransmayr
Edited by
Lívia Körtvélyessy  and
Pavol Štekauer
Lívia Körtvélyessy
Affiliation:
P. J. Šafárik University, Košice, Slovakia
Pavol Štekauer
Affiliation:
P. J. Šafárik University, Košice, Slovakia
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Summary

Not only formal word families are important for the organization of the morphologically complex lexicon, but also their semantic (or rather conceptual) subfamilies. This is shown with eighteen Austrian German diminutive compound families with the diminutive suffix -chen, and for their correspondent formal word families with the diminutive suffix -erl. For all of them, their competition (leading to mutual avoidances and semantic specializations), degree of morphosemantic transparency/opacity, productivity and left- vs. right-branching are accounted for. Our electronic database consists of nearly 13,000 different diminutive types which have at least five tokens within the Austrian Media Corpus.

Keywords

formal word familiessemantic subfamiliesGerman diminutive compound familiescompetition between diminutive suffixesmorphosemantic transparency/opacity
Type
Chapter
Information
Complex Words
Advances in Morphology
 , pp. 293 - 310
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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