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Historical Linguistics 2013: Selected papers from the 21st International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Oslo, 5-9 August 2013
Edited by Dag T.T. Haug
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 334] 2015
► pp. 155–176

Constructional change at the interface of cognition, culture, and language use

A diachronic corpus study of German nominalization patterns

On the basis of an extensive corpus analysis, this paper investigates how cognitive, cultural, and language-internal factors conspire in the diachronic development of German nominalization patterns. Focusing on nominalization with the suffix -ung, the present study demonstrates that this word-formation pattern is subject to an increasing array of word-formation constraints. This is due to (a) shifts in the availability and prototypicality of reading variants evoked by the word-formation pattern, (b) the increasing productivity of competing word-formation patterns, and (c) sociocultural factors such as the emergence of language purism, which promoted the replacement of ung-derivatives with other word-formation products. The results of the corpus analysis lend support to a usage-based and radically constructionist view of morphology and morphological change.
Keywords: cognitive linguistics, construction Morphology, German historical linguistics, word-formation change
Published online: 1 October 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.334.09har
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Hartmann, Stefan
2018. Derivational morphology in flux: a case study of word-formation change in German. Cognitive Linguistics 29:1 ► pp. 77 ff. DOI logo

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