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XII. Historical word-formation III: Language sketches
109. Historical word-formation in German
1. Current state of research
2. General development tendencies
3. Composition
4. Derivation
5. Conversion
6. Further types of word-formation
7. References
Abstract
The article offers a description of the historical development of German word-formation and the forms of change in word-formation which are thereby revealed. Following an overview of the history of research, general developmental tendencies are initially explained. Subsequently, a description is presented of the important processes of change for the areas of compounding, derivation and conversion which reaches from the beginnings to the present. A brief overview of further types of word-formation concludes the article.
1. Current state of research
The investigation of historical word-formation in German (for an overview cf. Müller 1993, 2002 and Solms 1998) has its roots in the 19th century. Jacob Grimm’s treatment of word-formation in the second and third volume of his Deutsche Grammatik [German Grammar] (1819−37) became formative for a long period of time. Grimm’s description which was primarily diachronic and more oriented towards etymological criteria, more morphologically than semantically, and more oriented toward the single word than the system of word-formation, also remained fundamentally influential for the later work of Wilmanns (1899), Paul (1920), Kluge (1925) and Henzen (1965) which was indebted to the neogrammarian tradition.
Since the mid-1980s this line of research has been supplemented by “research on historical-synchronic word-formation” in the course of a theoretical and methodological paradigm shift. Characteristic of this approach are the following goals which constitute a contrast to the traditional diachronic view of word-formation: (i) The reconstruction of historical systems of word-formation in order to understand the functional interaction of morphemes and patterns of word-formation. The analysis is thus undertaken primarily from a synchronic perspective, i.e. with regard to a particular period of time, revealing the morphological-semantic motivation of word-formations present at this point in time. (ii) The analysis of word-formation is developed on the basis of the evaluation of large text corpora, not examples from dictionaries or chance discoveries, and the results are based on an exact percentual evaluation of a corpus, not on estimates of frequency. (iii) The diachronic comparison of historical-synchronic analyses of word-formation makes statements possible about change in systems of word-formation, about shifts in the functional potential of models of word-formation, competition and opposition, as well as the functional interaction of models of word-formation in the establishment of functional classes (i.e. categories of word-formation such as action nouns, agent nouns, collective nouns, etc.; cf. sections 3−5), so that lines of development become visible from the medieval to the early modern and New High German system of word-formation.
Corresponding studies of word-formation were initially presented for Early New High German (ENHG, 1350−1650) (cf. Müller 1993a; Döring and Eichler 1996; Brendel et al. 1997; Russ 2004 for derivation of nouns; Habermann 1994, and Prell and Schebben- Schmidt 1996 for word-formation of verbs; Thomas 2002 for derivation of adjectives). In recent years, Middle High German (MHG, 1050−1350) has become the center of attention (cf. Herbers 2002; Leipold 2006 for word-formation of verbs; Ring 2008 and Ganslmayer 2012 for derivation of nouns and adjectives in the MHG language of documents as well as the comprehensive description of derivation and compounding in nouns, adjectives and verbs in volume III of the Mittelhochdeutsche Grammatik [Middle High German Grammar] (= Mhd. Gr. III). Old High German (OHG, 750−1050) has, on the other hand, not yet been made accessible in the same way via historical-synchronic studies of word-formation (for an overview of research cf. Meineke 2009). Splett’s (1993) word-family dictionary represents an important tool for future studies of OHG word-formation. Research on word-formation in OHG presents specific problems, however, due to the limited written record (slightly exceeding 28,000 lexemes), the dominance of glossing vocabulary (ca. two thirds) as well as the high proportion of (partially apocryphal) hapax legomena. All this makes a comparison of OHG word-formation with later systems of word-formation difficult.
In addition to word-formation in OHG, word-formation in recent stages of German (17th−20th century) has also not yet been sufficiently studied. Only a few newer studies can be found (cf. Bentzinger 1991 on adjective suffixes, Stricker 2000 on terms referring to persons in Goethe, Pounder 2000 on adjectival derivation from the 16th to the 19th century, Heinle 2004 on word-formation of adverbs, Scherer 2005 on the productivity of -er- derivatives in newspaper language).
Brief overviews of research on word-formation in historical stages of German are presented in Splett (2000) on OHG, Meier and Möhn on Old Low German/Old Saxon (ca. 800−1200), Zutt (2000) on MHG, Cordes and Niebaum (2000) on Middle Low German (13th−16th century), Wegera and Prell (2000) on ENHG, Heinle (2000) on NHG (17th−20th century) as well as Wellmann (1997), Habermann (2002), Müller (2002), Munske (2002), Erben (2003a) and Scherer (2006) on general developmental tendencies and on change in word-formation.
As this overview shows, previous studies of historical word-formation in German have placed an emphasis in the area of derivation of nouns, adjectives and verbs. Studies on compounding, which are always confronted with the problem of differentiating between a syntagma and a product of word-formation (cf. Pavlov 1983; Solling 2012) are by comparison in the minority, and the historical development of conversion is also only partially captured. For other types of word-formation, on the other hand, independent studies are completely missing. A comprehensive description of the historical wordformation of adverbs is provided by Heinle (2004), although it is largely compiled from dictionaries. Article 93 on foreign word-formation in German provides an overview of the roots of German foreign word-formation. Thus, for German an outline of historical word-formation and change in word-formation can be sketched, whereas the development of a comprehensive description on a historical-synchronic basis which can supplement the traditional handbooks will presumably remain a long-term objective for some time.
2. General developmental tendencies
The developmental tendencies discussed below involve partly change in word-formation in a narrow sense, in which models of word-formation undergo ...
