Genitives and proper name compounds in German

Abstract

This paper deals with an issue related to the syntax-morphology interface, namely the comparison of proper name compounds and genitives in German. It has been claimed in the literature that proper name compounds have recently increased in use at the expense of the genitive. For this reason, proper name compounds are sometimes considered as competitors to the genitive. A prerequisite for this assumption is that both constructions are equivalent with respect to meaning and function. The paper examines the relevant properties of both constructions. It is argued that there is no true meaning equivalence between proper name compounds and genitives. However, specific subtypes of proper name compounds and genitives that exhibit a substantial amount of semantic overlap are identified. It is discussed under which circumstances they can be used interchangeably.

The impact of semantic relations on grammatical alternation: an experimental study of proper name modifiers and determiner genitives

“…The operationalization we decided on of course bears some relation to previous classifications of semantic relations in discussions of the PNG/PNM alternation. The most detailed to date, albeit based on an analogous alternation in German, is that of Schlücker (2018). Our possessor relation denotes possession in the narrow sense, rather than the very broad sense of Schlücker's HAVE relation (which also includes subjective/authorial genitives and objective genitives/genitives of product).…”

“…Nevertheless, semantic relations such as the 'named after' relation (e.g. the Eiffel tower) are still widely taken to be exclusive to the PNM construction (see Schlücker 2018 for the analogous PNM/PNG alternation in German and references to previous claims that the same holds for English). The aim of this paper is to further investigate the role played by semantics in the PNG/PNM alternation and to identify the semantic relations that do and do not alternate between the PNG and PNM constructions.…”

Special issue: Different perspectives on proper noun modifiers

“…This idea has been challenged: Breban (2018) argues that they both help identify the noun phrase referent but do this in different ways and are therefore functionally different. Schlücker (2018) argues that the two constructions are semantically different in that, even when they alternate, determiner genitives express relations within the 'genitive repertoire' and proper noun modifiers express relations from the 'noun modifier repertoire'.…”

“…But where Schlücker's argumentation was purely theoretical, they conduct an experiment in which participants are asked to provide paraphrases for the two constructions in actually attested examples. In her contribution, Rosenbach responds to the challenges by Schlücker (2018) and especially Breban (2018), arguing that the very concept of semantic equivalence is not the same in semantic-pragmatic and functional analyses as in variationist studies.…”

“…The first scholars to single them out as special were Anette Rosenbach and Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm (Koptjevskaja-Tamm & Rosenbach 2005). Since then, there has emerged a small but growing body of studies on English (Rosenbach 2006(Rosenbach , 2007(Rosenbach , 2010Breban 2018), Swedish (Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2009 and German (Zifonun 2010a(Zifonun , 2010bSchlücker 2013Schlücker , 2018, which rather than fully explaining the phenomenon raise a variety of interesting questions and topics to explore. These questions pertain to different areas of linguistics and require different empirical data and methods to answer them.…”