The morphologization of German noun-participle combinations. A diachronic case study

Abstract

The present paper focuses on the recent history of German noun-participle combinations in which the noun saturates an argument of the base verb. These structures are hybrids between phrases and words, yielding variation in spelling and in the form of the nominal constituent. For instance, the combinations Mitleid erregend vs. mitleidØerregend vs. mitleidserregend ‘pitiful’, lit. “pity-arousing” (where Ø represents a zero morpheme) exemplify such variation, which is a (preliminary) result of (ongoing) language change. Therefore, this paper studies how the noun-participle pattern has diachronically evolved between syntax and word formation since the 18th century. Spelling and nominal forms are used as central indicators. For the latter, two approaches based on verb-valency are introduced. Data from the German Text Archive and DWDS core corpus show that over the past 300 years, noun-participle combinations have undergone a process of morphologization: they are increasingly written as a graphemic unit and take nominal forms that are typical of nominal root compounds. Moreover, this study shows that morphologization is partly supported by high token frequencies of individual types. It is argued that the phenomenon is best characterized by assuming a gradient distinction between syntax and word formation.