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Derivational morphology in flux: a case study of word-formation change in German

  • Stefan Hartmann EMAIL logo
From the journal Cognitive Linguistics

Abstract

The diachronic change of word-formation patterns is currently gaining increasing interest in cognitive-linguistic and constructionist approaches. This paper contributes to this line of research with a corpus-based investigation of nominalization with the suffix -ung in German. In doing so, it puts forward both theoretical and methodological considerations on morphology and morphological change from a usage-based perspective. Regarding methodology, the long-standing topic of how to measure (changes in) the productivity of a morphological pattern is discussed, and it is shown how statistical association measures can be applied to quantify the relationship between word-formation patterns and their bases. These findings are linked up with theoretical considerations on the interplay between constructional schemas and their respective instances.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to three reviewers and particularly Harald Baayen for helpful comments and suggestions. In addition, the project reported on here as well the paper itself have benefitted from the input of many different people, including Damaris Nübling, Renata Szczepaniak, Michael Pleyer, Luise Kempf, Susanne Flach, Daniela Schröder, Lisa Dücker, Eleonore Schmitt, Melitta Gillmann, and Annika Vieregge. Remaining errors are of course mine.

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Received: 2016-12-12
Revised: 2017-8-14
Accepted: 2017-8-20
Published Online: 2018-2-14
Published in Print: 2018-2-23

© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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