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A phonestheme can be situated somewhere between a morpheme and a sound symbolic unit as well as between single-language and widespread appearance. Very often, phonesthemes are defined statistically. Consonant clusters like "gl-" appear in many words with certain aspects of meaning like "glint, glimmer, glitter". These cases seem to be restricted to individual languages or language families and resemble morphemes. A natural or iconic relationship between form and meaning is not obvious. Several authors, however, include sound symbolic phenomena with implicit natural features such as "i" for small things. This is a very widespread phenomenon and an example for some natural link between form and meaning. The article pleads for a two-fold definition and two types of phonesthemes. Further discussion takes into account the idea of an interrelation between increasing iconicity and higher diffusion as exemplified by the phonesthemes.
In German, non-finite forms of verbs that are traditionally labelled as "nominalized infinitives", but are better categorized as gerunds, can show very unusual features. Although they carry a definitive article and therefore clearly seem to belong to the class of nouns, they still govern objects and adverbials in exactly the same way the verb does. It is therefore argued that in spite of the determiners, these forms are essentially verbal in nature. The syntactic functions they fulfil can be anything from subject or object to adverbial or attributive modifier, i. e. functions that are usually fulfilled by subordinate clauses. Since this is the same kind of behavior that converbs in languages like Turkish show, this leads to the suggestion that they can indeed be considered as a functionally similar to converbs.
The paper presents the possibilities for analyzing deverbal derivatives from verbs ending in -ier(en); in many cases these exist as doublets, with the suffix -ung and/or the suffix -(at)ion. Based on selected examples of these doublets, the paper demonstrates how both monolingual and bilingual dictionaries fail to take sufficient account of the semantic differences between such competing forms. The author also presents research questions connected with this issue, and outlines a methodology for addressing these questions based on metalexicographic and corpus analysis; this methodology is demonstrated using the example of the doublet Diskrimination and Diskriminierung
Due to its specific features, the German participle has numerous functions and uses in word-formation. As partially deverbalized adjectives, participles take on the syntactic role of an adjective while at the same time retaining the valency of a verb. The paper presents the various steps in an analysis using graded (partial) corpora. Drawing on research into the properties and functions of various participle forms, it explores their specific uses in texts.