German Compounds Research Articles

The Semantic Structure of English and German Compounds: Same or Different?

Previous work has revealed significant formal differences between English and German nominal compounds. This study extends the contrastive analysis of compounds to the semantic level. The empirical investigation is guided by two major questions: firstly, does the type of semantic relation between the constituents of compounds exert an influence on their English translations? Secondly, is there any difference in the range of idiomaticity covered by English and German compounds? The answer to both questions is in the negative. On the tests performed, English and German compounds do not differ semantically. This constitutes a notable form-meaning mismatch. This mismatch is argued to arise from the subordination of iconicity to freedom of expression. Moreover, the greater compound propensity in German compared to English cannot be put down to semantic effects. German leans towards uniform coding whereas English wavers between the compounding and the phrasal strategy. This competition is claimed to constrain compound use in English.

Metaphor and its humorousness: The case of nominal compounds in German

AbstractThis paper discusses the interaction between metaphor and humor by focusing on humorous metaphor-based nominal compounds in German. The paper highlights the lexical level of verbal humor, which has been largely overlooked in the linguistic humor studies. Viewing the nominal compound as one of the smallest units of verbal humor, the present study seeks to distinguish this from discussions of metaphorical humor that are concerned with specific sentence-level constructions. Nominal compounds are simple in terms of structural formation but the two constituents play a complex role in meaning construction, and the complexity increases when metaphor is involved. It is this aspect that has the potential to generate the incongruity required to induce humor. The humor in metaphor-based nominal compounds is produced by the mechanism that creates and resolves the incongruity between the literal and the figurative meaning of the whole compound, supported by a range of meaning construction types of the metaphor-based compound. This study focuses on German nominal compounds that are marked as “humorous” in the dictionary.

Interfix knowledge is fixed: Evidence from the composition of German compounds by persons with aphasia

Interfix knowledge is fixed: Evidence from the composition of German compounds by persons with aphasia

An Etymological Proposition: Old Germanic Gōd-Spōd ‘Good Fortune’ As Source Of Old Church Slavonic Gospodь ‘Lord, Master’

Abstract A thorough checking of the data provided by three etymological dictionaries, namely Georgiev et al. 1971 (s.v. gospod), Vasmer 1986 (s.v. gospod’) and Derksen 2008 (s.v. *gospodь), would be enough to raise serious doubts about the application of the label “inherited” to *gospodь and its large Slavic family. Vasmer (1986, s.v. Russian gospod’ ‘the Lord, God’), states that the putative origin of the Russian word under discussion is a Proto-Slavic compound *gostьpodь; but it is also Vasmer who mentions that some outstanding linguists (including Antoine Meillet) objected to the mainstream etymological interpretation of gospod’. More recently, Derksen has stated that there is “no convincing explanation” for at least one element of the Proto-Slavic reconstruction *gospodь. By starting from such doubts and uncertainties, the authors of the present article will propound an etymology according to which *gospodъ and its derivatives – to be found in Slavic languages as well as in Romanian – actually reflect a very early borrowing of the Old Germanic compound which is still visible in English godspeed.

Investigating the flow of information during speaking: the impact of morpho-phonological, associative, and categorical picture distractors on picture naming.

In three experiments, participants named target pictures by means of German compound words (e.g., Gartenstuhl–garden chair), each accompanied by two different distractor pictures (e.g., lawn mower and swimming pool). Targets and distractor pictures were semantically related either associatively (garden chair and lawn mower) or by a shared semantic category (garden chair and wardrobe). Within each type of semantic relation, target and distractor pictures either shared morpho-phonological (word-form) information (Gartenstuhl with Gartenzwerg, garden gnome, and Gartenschlauch, garden hose) or not. A condition with two completely unrelated pictures served as baseline. Target naming was facilitated when distractor and target pictures were morpho-phonologically related. This is clear evidence for the activation of word-form information of distractor pictures. Effects were larger for associatively than for categorically related distractors and targets, which constitute evidence for lexical competition. Mere categorical relatedness, in the absence of morpho-phonological overlap, resulted in null effects (Experiments 1 and 2), and only speeded target naming when effects reflect only conceptual, but not lexical processing (Experiment 3). Given that distractor pictures activate their word forms, the data cannot be easily reconciled with discrete serial models. The results fit well with models that allow information to cascade forward from conceptual to word-form levels.

Typological aspects of phrasal compounds in English, German, Turkish and Turkic

AbstractThis paper discusses the properties of phrasal compounds in English, German, Turkish and Sakha, a Turkic language. Two questions are addressed: 1. What is the formal status of elements building (phrasal) compounds? 2. How can we distinguish compounds from phrasal forms? A number of traditional definitions and criteria are discussed, and the result is that they do not suffice to properly account for compounds, let alone phrasal compounds. The languages under discussion are investigated and compared. The result is that in English, German and Turkish tight semantic relations exist between the phrasal non-head and head, but in Turkish additional structural restrictions apply, (especially in reference to the (non)-argument status of the head) which may be due to the rich morphology of this language. The study on Sakha reveals that some phrasal compound types are similar to the Turkish types, without being identical to them.

Novel solvents for the single crystal growth of germanate phases by the flux method

A series of alkali-borate (Na2O·B2O3, Na2O·1.5B2O3, Na2O·2B2O3 and Li2O·B2O3), and a series of alkali-molybdate (Na2O·1.5MoO3, Na2O·2MoO3 and Li2O·MoO3) solvents were studied with a view to find out the suitable conditions for growing single crystals from germanate phases by the flux method. The ternary systems solvent-CaO–GeO2 were investigated and crystallization temperature and crystalized phase were determined. As a main result the concentration and temperature regions of crystallization of calcium germanates (Ca5Ge3O11, CaGeO3) and of some alkali germanates (Li2GeO3, Li2CaGeO4, Na2CaGe6O14) were experimentally determined for a first time. The conditions found for Ca2GeO4 growth are significantly more favorable than those known so far. Additionally during this study, two novel unknown phases were obtained. X-ray diffractograms of the novel phases are presented. The obtained conditions are a basis for successful single crystal growth by the flux method for all mentioned germanate compounds.

Translation of German and English Human-Denoting Compound Nouns into Russian

The authors provide a comparative analysis of human-denoting compound nouns in the word-building systems of the German, English and Russian languages. The analysis of the given group of words is carried out on the onomasiological basis pursuing the goal of revealing general and specific tendencies in the development of the given word-building categories of kindred and non-kindred languages. The qualitative and quantitative analysis of the given phenomena is aimed at revealing the general tendencies in the word-building system of human-denoting compound nouns (especially names of a man as a doer of an action) in the German, English and Russian languages, and also the regularities of their translation in the contrastive aspect. Among the word-building types the authors have singled out general and specific word-building meanings compound nouns of the given languages possess. Having analyzed the word-building meanings the authors single out two groups of compound human-denoting nouns (compound nouns based on action, compound nouns based on an attribute) and carry out their structural and semantic analysis to reveal the regularities of word-building of complex lexical units and their further translation. The authors also provide a table summarizing the received results.

Possessive / bahuvrīhi compounds in German

This paper deals with structural properties of German possessive compounds. Based on a comparison with compounds in Modern Greek, I argue against a general approach based exclusively on semantic criteria. Instead I distinguish between exocentric and endocentric formations in German, on the basis of specific structural criteria. In particular, I propose that compounds like Dickkopf ‘pigheaded person’ — also called bahuvrīhi or exocentric formations — are to be analysed as endocentric, right-headed compounds with a metonymical meaning. Furthermore, I propose that structures like Vierfüßer ‘quadruped’ and heißblütig ‘warm-blooded/hot-tempered’ are the real bahuvrīhi compounds in German, i.e. exocentric structures with a possessive meaning, headed by the derivational suffixes, -er or -ig.

Association norms for German noun compounds and their constituents.

We present a collection of association norms for 246 German depictable compound nouns and their constituents, comprising 58,652 association tokens distributed over 26,004 stimulus-associate pair types. Analyses of the data revealed that participants mainly provided noun associates, followed by adjective and verb associates. In corpus analyses, co-occurrence values for compounds and their associates were below those for nouns in general and their associates. The semantic relations between compound stimuli and their associates were more often co-hyponymy and hypernymy and less often hyponymy than for associations to nouns in general. Finally, we found a moderate correlation between the overlap of the associations to compounds and their constituents and the degree of semantic transparency. These data represent a collection of associations to German compound nouns and their constituents that constitute a valuable resource concerning the lexical semantic properties of the compound stimuli and the semantic relations between the stimuli and their associates. More specifically, the norms can be used for stimulus selection, hypothesis testing, and further research on morphologically complex words. The norms are available in text format (utf-8 encoding) as supplemental materials.

Identical constituent compounds in German

The status of identical constituent compounds (ICCs) (e.g. Künstler-Künstler, ‘artist-artist’) is discussed controversially in the morphological literature on German. In this paper, it is claimed that ICC formation is a productive word formation pattern in German. In the first part of the paper, I investigate the formal, semantic and pragmatic properties of ICCs in German. Based on this description, I discuss in more detail two conflicting claims about their meaning constitution: the ‘prototype reading claim’ and the ‘context-dependency claim’. I argue that ICCs do not behave differently, in principle, from canonical N+N compounds with respect to context-dependency. Based on a discussion of selected theoretical models of nominal compounds, an approach is sketched that takes into account not only semantic and contextual, but also stored conceptual and experiential knowledge as main sources of knowledge in ICC interpretation. In the second part of the paper, the results of a pilot experimental study are presented in which 40 native speakers were asked to paraphrase a set of context-free German ICCs. The findings clearly indicate that ICCs are systematically interpretable in isolation, with a significant preference for ‘prototype’ (e.g. Winter-Winter: ‘very cold winter’) and ‘real’ readings (e.g. Holz-Holz: ‘real wood, not artificial wood’).

A tree does not make a well-formed sentence: Improving syntactic string-to-tree statistical machine translation with more linguistic knowledge

Synchronous context-free grammars (SCFGs) can be learned from parallel texts that are annotated with target-side syntax, and can produce translations by building target-side syntactic trees from source strings. Ideally, producing syntactic trees would entail that the translation is grammatically well-formed, but in reality, this is often not the case. Focusing on translation into German, we discuss various ways in which string-to-tree translation models over- or undergeneralise. We show how these problems can be addressed by choosing a suitable parser and modifying its output, by introducing linguistic constraints that enforce morphological agreement and constrain subcategorisation, and by modelling the productive generation of German compounds.

Taxonomy Extraction from Automotive Natural Language Requirements Using Unsupervised Learning

In this paper we present a novel approach to semi-automatically learn concept hierarchies from natural language requirements of the automotive industry. The approach is based on the distributional hypothesis and the special characteristics of domain-specific German compounds. We extract taxonomies by using clustering techniques in combination with general thesauri. Such a taxonomy can be used to support requirements engineering in early stages by providing a common system understanding and an agreedupon terminology. This work is part of an ontology-driven requirements engineering process, which builds on top of the taxonomy. Evaluation shows that this taxonomy extraction approach outperforms common hierarchical clustering techniques.

Particles and Compounds in German: Evidence for the Compounding Parameter

This brief article discusses further evidence for the Compounding Parameter (TCP; Snyder 1995, 2001, 2007, 2011, 2012), which is a proposed point of cross-linguistic variation with considerable support from acquisitional studies of English. This brief article provides new support from children’s acquisition of German. Two points of German grammar that should both depend on the positive setting of TCP, namely separable-particle constructions and novel endocentric compounding, are shown to be acquired together by each of 10 German-learning children. These data are drawn from 10 longitudinal corpora of children’s spontaneous speech from the German section of CHILDES (MacWhinney 2000). The observed correlation remains strongly significant even when contributions of general development (e.g., language-processing abilities, conceptual development) are removed by means of a partial correlation procedure. Control measures reinforce the idea that these data reflect shared dependence of two surface forms on a single point of grammatical knowledge. The findings from German therefore lend strong new support to the Compounding Parameter.

Adaptation of machine translation for multilingual information retrieval in the medical domain

We investigate machine translation (MT) of user search queries in the context of cross-lingual information retrieval (IR) in the medical domain. The main focus is on techniques to adapt MT to increase translation quality; however, we also explore MT adaptation to improve effectiveness of cross-lingual IR. Our MT system is Moses, a state-of-the-art phrase-based statistical machine translation system. The IR system is based on the BM25 retrieval model implemented in the Lucene search engine. The MT techniques employed in this work include in-domain training and tuning, intelligent training data selection, optimization of phrase table configuration, compound splitting, and exploiting synonyms as translation variants. The IR methods include morphological normalization and using multiple translation variants for query expansion. The experiments are performed and thoroughly evaluated on three language pairs: Czech-English, German-English, and French-English. MT quality is evaluated on data sets created within the Khresmoi project and IR effectiveness is tested on the CLEF eHealth 2013 data sets. The search query translation results achieved in our experiments are outstanding - our systems outperform not only our strong baselines, but also Google Translate and Microsoft Bing Translator in direct comparison carried out on all the language pairs. The baseline BLEU scores increased from 26.59 to 41.45 for Czech-English, from 23.03 to 40.82 for German-English, and from 32.67 to 40.82 for French-English. This is a 55% improvement on average. In terms of the IR performance on this particular test collection, a significant improvement over the baseline is achieved only for French-English. For Czech-English and German-English, the increased MT quality does not lead to better IR results. Most of the MT techniques employed in our experiments improve MT of medical search queries. Especially the intelligent training data selection proves to be very successful for domain adaptation of MT. Certain improvements are also obtained from German compound splitting on the source language side. Translation quality, however, does not appear to correlate with the IR performance - better translation does not necessarily yield better retrieval. We discuss in detail the contribution of the individual techniques and state-of-the-art features and provide future research directions.

Structural study of Ca2Gd2Ge2O9 and optical spectroscopy of the Eu3+ dopant ion

The new rare earth-based germanate compound Ca2Gd2Ge2O9 (orthorhombic (Pnma) crystal structure), has been characterized and investigated for the first time, using synchrotron powder X-ray diffraction. From Rietveld refinement calculations on the collected powder pattern we observe an inhomogeneous distribution of the two available cationic sites by Gd3+ and Ca2+ ions. In particular, the former prefers the occupation (67.5%) of the site with 8-fold coordination. In addition, we observed a not negligible degree of distortion of the Ge2O76− unit. Finally, luminescence spectra and decay curves of Eu3+ doped Ca2Gd2Ge2O9 were measured and analysed taking into account the structural features of the host. The results reveal that this material shows strong red luminescence upon excitation in the region where blue LEDs emit (470nm).

Komplexe Sätze im deutschen wissenschaftlichen Text aus der Sicht der Perspektivierung

The present paper is based on earlier research on the functions of compound sentences in authorial and personal speech. In this paper, the functions of compound sentences in German scientific texts are analyzed from the general textual perspective. In scientific texts, this perspective is specified as argumentation. In German compound sentences, used in scientific texts, the argumentative viewpoint is manifested by variable means. In the sentences that contain subordinate clauses which are syntactically subjects, objects or predicates, lexical means are used to denote this perspective. They are actualized by matrix predicates having local or directional semantics. In causal clauses, the argumentative viewpoint is manifested by causal connectives. In relative clauses, this viewpoint is expressed indirectly by means of making terminological notions clear.

Structural investigation of the new Ca3Ln2Ge3O12 (Ln=Pr, Nd, Sm, Gd and Dy) compounds and luminescence spectroscopy of Ca3Gd2Ge3O12 doped with the Eu3+ ion

The crystal structures of new rare earth-based germanate compounds (Ca3Pr2Ge3O12, Ca3Nd2Ge3O12, Ca3Sm2Ge3O12, Ca3Gd2Ge3O12 and Ca3Dy2Ge3O12) have been determined by Rietveld refinement calculations on the collected synchrotron X-ray diffraction powder patterns. A different distribution of the rare earth ions in the three available crystal sites was observed, as the main structural feature. The reasons of the instability of the silico-carnotite structure for lanthanide ions out of the range Pr–Dy have been proposed. Finally, the luminescence spectroscopy of the Eu3+ dopant ion in Ca3Gd2Ge3O12 was presented and analyzed taking into account the observed structural characteristics. The Eu3+ luminescence spectroscopy was also compared with the one of Eu3+ doped Ca3Gd2Si3O12 and Ca3Lu2Si3O12 isostructural materials.

Expressive compounds in German

German adjectival and nominal compounds like ratten+scharf (‘rat sharp’) sau+schlecht, (‘sow bad’) Hammer+auftritt (‘hammer performance’), Arsch+gesicht (‘arse face’) contain meliorative or pejorative elements as part of their structure. The left-hand evaluative members of these compounds are usually considered as so-called semi-prefixes. Contrary to recent approaches within constructional morphology ( Booij 2009 , 2010 ), I will argue that these elements are still lexemes, but that they have undergone metaphorical extension. Evidence stems from the consideration of right-hand members like Kommunisten+schwein (‘communist pig’), which have never been considered as semi-suffixes in a similar way. The metaphorical meaning of these heads and non-heads is systematically connected with expressive meaning. It will be shown that the criteria for expressive meaning proposed by Potts (2007) by and large apply. Furthermore, I will argue against a possible analysis in terms of conventional implicature, as proposed by Williamson (2009 , 2010 ) with respect to the meanings of ethnical slur terms like spic.

Non-classifying compounds in German

It is widely acknowledged in the literature that the common function of the modifier in nominal compounds is the classifying function. Classifying modifiers specify what kind of entity is being denoted by the head noun, that is, they specify subkinds; e.g. apple juice ‘a kind of juice made from apples’. While the classifying function can certainly be regarded as the default function of lexical modification, lexical modifiers in nominal compounds may also have functions other than classification. Drawing on functional types of noun phrase modification from the typological literature, the article discusses lexical modifiers in German nominal compounds with an attitudinal or an identifying function, and the conditions under which they arise.