Accounting for the semantic extension of derived action nouns

Abstract

This paper examines the German action nouns derived with the suffix -ungwhich have acquired an additional sense denoting either the result of the action (e.g.Veröffentlichung‘publishing (action)’+‘publication (object)’, or a concrete referent connected with the action in some other way, e.g.Bewachung‘guarding (action)’+‘group of people who guard’. The phenomenon is analysed as a (non-prototypical) type of polysemy; a monosemic approach fails to explain the cases in which the referent of the additional senses of the nouns is established and/or idiosyncratic. The action nouns acquire extra senses as a way of ensuring economy in the morphological system as this avoids the need for large numbers of derivational affixes, each with an individual function. An unexpected implication of the findings is that the nouns studied – abstract nouns which acquire a second, often concrete sense – move against the accepted direction of semantic change, in which items with a specific sense acquire a more general sense.