Zwischen Transparenz und Lexikalisierung: Das Wortbildungsmuster X-ung(e) im MittelhochdeutschenFür wertvolle Hinweise zu einer ersten Fassung dieses Artikels danke ich Damaris Nübling und Ulrike Demske. Für hilfreiche Diskussionen über einige der hier vertretenen Thesen danke ich Philipp Dorok. Verbleibende Unzulänglichkeiten liegen natürlich in meiner Verantwortung.

Abstract

Abstract While the development of German -ung-nominalization (e. g. Landung ›landing‹, Bildung ›education‹, Heizung ›heating installation‹, Bedienung ›service; waiter/waitress‹) from Early New High German to New High German is fairly well-studied, the Middle High German (MHG) period has been neglected so far. This paper aims at filling this gap with a corpus-based study of MHG -ung-nominals. The data are derived from the document archive of the new MHG dictionary, containing about 7 million word forms from 207 texts. From these data, a corpus of 2355 -ung-nominals in their respective contexts has been assembled and analyzed. The corpus provides evidence for the hypothesis that the MHG -ung-nominals adopt the semantic content of their respective base verbs altogether more comprehensively than their NHG equivalents. However, the tendency towards lexicalization (and, thereby, loss of transparency and decrease of ›verb-proximity‹) is already visible. Therefore I argue that the development of ung-nominals from rather peripheral to more prototypical nouns by means of lexicalization started as early as in the MHG period.