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Besides some well-established forms like autoritär 'authoritarian'; humanitär 'humanitarian'; new coinages ending with -itär can be found in German. These adjectives are closely related to nouns ending with -ität. From an etymological point of view; these formations are morphologically transparent. Not only are the adjectives new; but -itär emerges as a new suffix.
As part of a major project on the syntactic organisation of written discourse in the recent history of the English language, this paper tackles the distribution of sentences comprising left-dislocated constituents in a corpus of texts from late Middle English onwards. Once the phenomenon of left dislocation has been properly defined, this investigation will concentrate on the analysis of the corpus in the following directions: (i) statistical evolution of left dislocation in the recent history of the English language; (ii) the influence of orality and genre on left dislocation; (iii) information conveyed by the left-dislocated material, that is, the discourse-based referentiality potential of the left-dislocated constituents in terms of recoverability, and its association with end-focus; and (iv) grammatical complexity of the left-dislocated material and its association with end-weight.
The filling of the 'Vorfeld' in German sentences is basically obligatory; which constituent, however, actually moves to the Vorfeld is underdetermined by syntax and thus governed presumably by discourse factors. Coming from English, there are certain competing expectations one could have: either the topic — more specifically, the backward-looking center — of a sentence is moved to the Vorfeld, or an element in a poset relationship to a set mentioned in the previous discourse, or elements with other functions, such as the exposition of brand-new information or the setting of a scene. A study of a corpus of texts of different stylistic levels showed that indeed all elements expected to appear in the Vorfeld are eligible for Vorfeld-movement, but that there is a strict ranking. Preferred Vorfeld-fillers are phrases containing brand-new information as well as scene-setting elements; only if no such elements are present can elements in a poset relationship with some previously mentioned set be moved to the Vorfeld. Finally, if such elements are not present either, backward-looking centers can move to the Vorfeld. Backward-looking centers have, for this reason, a relatively poor quota among Vorfeld-fillers, namely around 50%.
The paper investigates the different productivity domains (Rainer 2005) of two Italian event denoting suffixes, -mento and -zione. These suffixes share the same eventive semantics, they are both productive and thus can be seen as rivals in the formation of event nominalizations. The aim is to obtain a better understanding of the constraints that play a role in the selection of one affix over the other. By means of a logistic regression model the contribution of different features of the base verb is investigated. The analysis is conducted on a dataset of 678 nominalizations extracted from a section of Midia, a diachronic balanced corpus explicitly built for morphological research (Gaeta 2017). Results show that the frequency, the inflectional class and the number of characters of the base verb as well as the presence of the prefix a- significantly contribute to the definition of the different domains, only partially confirming previous findings.
This paper presents psycholinguistic evidence on the factors governing the resolution of German personal pronouns. To determine the relative influence of linear order versus grammatical function of potential antecedents, two interpretation-preference tasks were designed. Their specific aim was to disentangle salience factors conflated in previous research on pronoun interpretation, such as linear or-der, first mention and topicalization. Experiment 1 tested pronoun resolution to non-sentence-initial position (scrambling) and Experiment 2 tested pronoun resolution to sentence-initial position (topicalization). The results across different verb types and across different syntactic contexts in Experiments 1 and 2 show that grammatical function, yet neither linear order, first mention nor topicalization predicts pronoun resolution in German.
In ihrer neuesten Publikation befasst sich die ausgewiesene Wortbildungsexpertin Elke Donalies mit Fällen wie Wetterbeobachter, Dickhäuter, Vergissmeinnicht, zartfühlend und wieviel, deren linguistische Erfassung nach wie vor Probleme bereitet. Grund dafür dürfte zum einen sein, dass die Worthaftigkeit der untersuchten Einheiten vielfach fraglich ist (z. B. zart fühlend als syntaktische Fügung vs. zartfühlend als Wort bzw. Wortbildungsprodukt). Zum anderen ist die Analyse der Einheiten – bei Zuordnung zum Bereich Wortbildung – schwierig und im Resultat entsprechend vielfältig (z. B. Dickhäuter als Derivation, Zusammenbildung oder synthetic compound (vgl. S. 114)). Donalies hat sich also mit der Wahl derartiger "linguistischer Problemmacher" viel vorgenommen und insgesamt drei Jahre Projektzeit im Rahmen ihrer IDS-Tätigkeit dafür aufgewendet (Januar 2015–Januar 2018).
Glottal marking of vowel-initial German words by glottalization and glottal stop insertion were investigated in dependence on speech rate, word type (content vs. function words), word accent, phrasal position and the following vowel. The analysed material consisted of speeches of Konrad Adenauer, Thomas Mann and Richard von Weizsäcker. The investigation shows that not only the left boundary of accented syllables (including phrasal stress boundary) and lexical words favour glottal stops/glottalization, but also that the segmental level appears to have a strong impact on these insertion processes. Specifically, the results show that low vowels in contrast to non-low ones favour glottal stops/glottalization even before non-accented syllables and functional words.
Based on the privative derivational suffix -los, we test statements found in the literature on word formation using a – at least in this field – novel empirical basis: a list of affective-emotional ratings of base nouns and associated -los derivations. In addition to a frequency analysis based on the German Reference Corpus, we show that, in general, emotional polarity (so-called valence, positive vs. negative emotions) is reversed by suffixation with -los. This change is stronger for more polarized base nouns. The perceived intensity of emotion (so-called arousal) is generally lower for -los derivations than for base nouns. Finally, to capture the results theoretically, we propose a prototypical -los construction in the framework of Construction Morphology.
The project WBLUX (Wortbildung des moselfränkisch-luxemburgischen Raumes) at the University of Luxembourg aims at the investigation of Luxembourgish word formation through different text sorts and genres. In order to achieve this goal the compilation of an annotated corpus is needed. This article gives an example for benefits of using a corpus with annotations like parts of speech, lemmata and word formation affixes in the analysis of productivity of some selected word formation affixes of Luxembourgish. Then it describes how one can achieve such a corpus from a technical point of view. This includes the choice of corpus format, of a database platform and the designing of programs needed for the annotation process of word formation itself. This article also suggests new corpus linguistic approaches for research of word formation like analyzing the usage of word formation bases in the entire corpus or performing context analysis in order to determine semantical functions of each suffix.
Contemporary German abounds in doubtful cases where linking elements alternate with zero elements, such as Seminar(+s?+)arbeit 'term paper', Respekt(+s?+)person 'person who commands respect'. This variation indicates a profound language change in the course of which the linking +s+ has spread continuously since Early New High German and is replacing the zero element more and more often. Today, +s+ is the most productive, progressive and most frequently occurring linking element. In this paper, we provide an explanation for the doubtful cases. Most often, the linking +s+ depends directly on the phonological quality of the first part of the compound: the worse its phonological structure, the more likely the occurrence of the linking +s+. It occurs most regularly after first parts of compounds containing a suffix or an unstressed prefix (Verkáuf+s+gespräch 'sales conversation'), while words with an ideal phonological structure (monosyllabic or trochaic words) rarely attract the linking +s+. The variation concentrates on compounds whose first parts feature a stressed prefix (Éinkauf(+s?+)führer 'shopping guide'). There is, however, a further factor which leads to fluctuation in the occurrence of the linking +s+. In cases where the second part of synthetic compounds such as Auftrag(+s?+)geber 'client' contain a high degree of verbality, the linking +s+ blurs the syntactic relation between the immediate constituents, strengthening the morphological character of the compound.