Cover not available
Article published In:
Languages in Contrast
Vol. 17:1 (2017) ► pp.43–68

Compounding in German and English

A quantitative translation study

| University of Hamburg

German is well-known for its propensity for nominal compounding. This claim is put on a firmer empirical footing by means of a bidirectional translation study between German and English. The difference between the two languages crystallizes in the competition between compounds and phrases. Two complementary asymmetries emerge: first, German compounds are more frequently translated by English phrases than English compounds by German phrases; second, English phrases are more frequently translated by German compounds than German phrases by English compounds. An extension to other word classes shows that the compounding bias in German is not restricted to nouns. It is tentatively argued that the token frequency of word classes plays a role in the emergence of compound propensity. The heavier use of nouns and adjectives in German than in English might be partly responsible for the higher rate of nominal and adjectival compounding in the former than the latter language.

Keywords: compounding, English, German, type frequency, token frequency
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Method
  • 3.Translating nominal compounds (and phrases)
  • 4.Assessing the rate of non-nominal compounding
  • 5.A frequency analysis of German and English word classes
  • 6.Outlook
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Primary Works


This article is currently available as a sample article.

Published online: 13 February 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.17.1.03ber
References
Ahlemeyer, Birgit and Inga Kohlhof
1999 Bridging the cleft: An analysis of the translation of English ”it“-clefts into German. Languages in Contrast 21: 1–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Andrews, Sally, Brett Miller and Keith Rayner
2004 Eye movements and morphological segmentation of compound words: There is a mouse in mousetrap. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology 161: 285–311. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baayen, R. Harald, Richard Piepenbrock and Leon Gulikers
1995 The CELEX lexical database. Philadelphia, PA: Linguistic Data Consortium.Google Scholar
Bauer, Laurie
1978 The grammar of nominal compounding. Odense: Odense University Press.Google Scholar
1998 When is a sequence of two nouns a compound in English? English Language and Linguistics 21: 65–86. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Becker, Thomas
1992 Compounding in German. Rivista di Linguistica 41: 5–36.Google Scholar
Berg, Thomas
1992 Prelexical and postlexical features in language production. Applied Psycholinguistics 131: 199–235. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2000 The position of adjectives on the noun-verb continuum. English Language and Linguistics 41: 269–293. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2012 The cohesiveness of English and German compounds. The Mental Lexicon 71: 1–33. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016 The multiplanar nature of frequency. Glottotheory 71: 1–19. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Berg, Thomas, Sabine Helmer, Marion Neubauer and Arne Lohmann
2012 Determinants of the extent of compound use: A contrastive study. Linguistics 501: 269–303. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas and Victoria Clark
2002 Historical shifts in modification patterns with complex noun phrase structures. In English historical syntax and morphology, Teresa Fanego, María José López-Cousa and Javier Pérez-Guerra (eds), 43–66. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bien, Heidrun, Willem J. M. Levelt and R. Harald Baayen
2005 Frequency effects in compound production. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 1021: 17876–17881. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Deng, Yaochen
2009 A synergetic linguistic study on compounding propensity in technical English. Glottotheory 21: 54–61.Google Scholar
Djirackor, Yao
1982 Untersuchungen zur Wiedergabe deutscher Substantivkomposita im Englischen. Eine kontrastive Studie. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Hamburg, Germany.Google Scholar
Doherty, Monika
1993 Parametrisierte Perspektive. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 121: 3–38. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Donalies, Elke
2004 Grammatik des Deutschen im europäischen Vergleich: Kombinatorische Begriffsbildung. Teil 1: Substantivkomposition. Mannheim: Institut für deutsche Sprache.Google Scholar
2008 Komposita, Derivate und Phraseme des Deutschen im europäischen Vergleich. Deutsche Sprache 361: 305–323.Google Scholar
Dressler, Wolfgang U., Gary Libben, Jacqueline Stark, Christiane Pons and Gonia Jarema
2001 The processing of interfixed German compounds. In Yearbook of Morphology 1999, Geert Booij and Jaap van Marle (eds), 185–220. Dordrecht: Kluwer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Erben, Johannes
2003 Hauptaspekte der Entwicklung der Wortbildung in der Geschichte der deutschen Sprache. In Sprachgeschichte, Vol. 31, Werner Besch, Anne Betten, Oskar Reichmann and Stefan Sonderegger (eds), 2525–2539. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Ermlich, Karsten
2004 Zur Wiedergabe deutscher Substantivkomposita im Englischen. Deutsch als Fremdsprache 411: 206–212.Google Scholar
Fabb, Nigel
1998 Compounding. In The handbook of morphology, Andrew Spencer and Arnold Zwicky (eds), 66–83. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Fan, Fengxiang and Gabriel Altmann
2007 Some properties of English compounds. In Problems of typological and quantitative lexicology, Volodymir Kaliuscenko, Reinhard Köhler and Viktor Levickij (eds), 177–189. Chernivtsi: Puta.Google Scholar
Fay, David and Anne Cutler
1977 Malapropisms and the structure of the mental lexicon. Linguistic Inquiry 81: 505–520.Google Scholar
Fischer, Klaus
1999 Englische und deutsche Satzstrukturen: ein valenztheoretischer Vergleich mit statistischen Anmerkungen. Sprachwissenschaft 241: 221–255.Google Scholar
2007 Komplexität und semantische Transparenz im Deutschen und Englischen. Sprachwissenschaft 321: 355–405.Google Scholar
Gaeta, Livio and Davide Ricca
2009 “Composita solvantur”: Compounds as lexical units or morphological objects? Rivista di Linguistica 211: 35–70.Google Scholar
Greenberg, Joseph H.
1960 A quantitative approach to the morphological typology of language. International Journal of American Linguistics 261: 178–194. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gunkel, Lutz and Gisela Zifonun
2008 Constraints on relational-adjective noun constructions: A comparative view on English, German and French. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 561: 283–302. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hilpert, Martin
2015 From hand-carved to computer-based: Noun-participle compounding and the upward strengthening hypothesis. Cognitive Linguistics 261: 113–147. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hüning, Matthias and Barbara Schlücker
2010 Konvergenz und Divergenz in der Wortbildung – Komposita im Niederländischen und Deutschen. In Kontrastive germanistische Linguistik. Band 2, Antje Dammel, Sebastian Kürschner and Damaris Nübling (eds), 783–825. Hildesheim: Olms.Google Scholar
James, Carl
1980 Contrastive analysis. Harlow: Longman.Google Scholar
Johansson, Stig and Knut Hofland
1989 Frequency analysis of English vocabulary and grammar. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
Juhasz, Barbara J. , Matthew S. Starr, Albrecht W. Inhoff and Lars Placke
2003 The effects of morphology on the processing of compound words: Evidence from naming, lexical decision and eye fixations. British Journal of Psychology 941: 223–244. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Klinge, Alex
2005 The structure of English nominals. Unpublished postdoctoral thesis. Copenhagen.Google Scholar
Koester, Dirk, Thomas C. Gunter, Susanne Wagner and Angela D. Friederici
2004 Morphosyntax, prosody, and linking elements: The auditory processing of German nominal compounds. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 161: 1647–1668. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kortmann, Bernd and Paul Georg Meyer
1992 Is English grammar more explicit than German grammar, after all? In New departures in contrastive linguistics. Vol. 11, Christian Mair and Manfred Markus (eds), 155–166. Innsbruck: Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft.Google Scholar
Krott, Andrea, Robert Schreuder and R. Harald Baayen
1999 Complex words in complex words. Linguistics 371: 905–926. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Krzeszowski, Tomasz P.
1990 Contrasting languages. The scope of contrastive linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kuperman, Victor, Robert Schreuder, Raymond Bertram and R. Harald Baayen
2009 Reading polymorphemic Dutch compounds: Toward a multiple route model of lexical access. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 351: 876–895.Google Scholar
Lieber, Rochelle
1992 Compounding in English. Rivista di Linguistica 41: 79–96.Google Scholar
Mair, Christian, Marianne Hundt, Geoffrey Leech and Nicholas Smith
2002 Short-term diachronic shifts in part-of-speech frequencies. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 71: 245–264. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marchand, Hans
1969 The categories and types of present-day English word-formation. Munich: Beck.Google Scholar
Matthews, Stephen and Virginia Yip
2004 Cantonese: A comprehensive grammar. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Morton, John
1969 Interaction of information in word recognition. Psychological Review 761: 165–178. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mühlhäusler, Peter
1979 Growth and structure of the lexicon of New Guinea Pidgin. Canberra: Department of Linguistics, Australian National University.Google Scholar
Pastor-Gómez, Iria
2011 The status and development of N + N sequences in contemporary English noun phrases. Bern: Lang. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Potter, Simeon
1957 Modern linguistics. London: Andre Deutsch.Google Scholar
Roelofs, Ardi
1997 Morpheme frequency in speech production: Testing WEAVER. In: Yearbook of Morphology 1996, Geert Booij and Jaap van Marle (eds), 135–154. Dordrecht: Kluwer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rohdenburg, Günter
1998 Subordinate clauses introduced by interpretative verbs in English and their less explicit counterparts in German. In Kontrast und Äquivalenz, Wolfgang Börner and Klaus Vogel (eds), 233–249. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar
Sadeniemi, Markus, Kimmo Kettunen, Tiina Lindh-Knuutila and Timo Honkela
2008 Complexity of European Union languages: A comparative approach. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 151: 185–211. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sanchez, Christina
2008 Consociation and dissociation. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar
Schlücker, Barbara
2012 Die deutsche Kompositionsfreudigkeit. Übersicht und Einführung. In Das Deutsche als kompositionsfreudige Sprache, Livio Gaeta and Barbara Schlücker (eds), 1–15. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Steiner, Erich
2012 A characterization of the resource based on shallow statistics. In Cross-linguistic corpora for the study of translations, Silvia Hansen-Schirra, Stella Neumann and Erich Steiner (eds), 71–89. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stöhr, Ingo R.
1987 Pragmatic factors and nominal compounding: the influence of „deictic” reference in English and German. In Neuere Forschungen zur Wortbildung und Historiographie der Linguistik, Brigitte Asbach-Schnitker and Johannes Roggenhofer (eds), 31–39. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar
Twain, Mark
1880/1997 A tramp abroad. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Wandruszka, Mario
1968 Englische und deutsche Nominalkomposition. In Wortbildung, Syntax und Morphologie, Herbert E. Brekle and Leonhard Lipka (eds), 242–250. The Hague: Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1969 Sprachen. Vergleichbar und unvergleichlich. Munich: Piper.Google Scholar
Zimmer, Karl E.
1981 Some general observations about nominal compounds. In Wortbildung, Leonhard Lipka and Hartmut Günther (eds), 233–257. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.Google Scholar
Zwicky, Arnold M.
1978/79 Classical malapropisms. Language Sciences 11, 339–348. DOI logoGoogle Scholar

Primary Works

German → English

Schirach, Ferdinand von
: Der Fall Collini. Munich: Piper 2011 (up to middle of p. 98). – English translation: The Collini Case. Harmondsworth: Penguin 2012 (up to and including p. 105)Google Scholar

English → German

Rankin, Ian
: Exit music. London: Orion 2007 (up to and including p. 211). – German translation: Ein Rest von Schuld. Munich: Goldmann 2008 (up to and including p. 253).Google Scholar

English

Christie, Agatha
: Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple and Three Whodunits. – Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple und Drei Fälle. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag 1984/1998.Google Scholar
Baron, Alexander et al.
: English Short Stories – Englische Kurzgeschichten. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag 1984/1994.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 7 other publications

Deilen, Silvana, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski & Michael Carl
2023. Cognitive aspects of compound translation: Insights into the relation between implicitation and cognitive effort from a translation process perspective. Ampersand 11 ► pp. 100156 ff. DOI logo
Egan, Thomas & Hildegunn Dirdal
2017. Chapter 1. Lexis in contrast today. In Cross-linguistic Correspondences [Studies in Language Companion Series, 191], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Heilmann, Arndt, Jonas Freiwald, Stella Neumann & Zoë Miljanović
2022. Analyzing the effects of entrenched grammatical constructions on translation. Translation, Cognition & Behavior 5:1 ► pp. 110 ff. DOI logo
Kosmata, Eva & Barbara Schlücker
2022. Contact-induced grammatical change?. Languages in Contrast 22:1 ► pp. 77 ff. DOI logo
Maekelberghe, Charlotte & Isabelle Delaere
2023. Functional hybridity in translation. Languages in Contrast 23:2 ► pp. 252 ff. DOI logo
Prinzie, Thomas, Ferran Suñer & Kristel Van Goethem
2022. From Crystal-clear to Limpide: Translating English [Noun+adj] Compound Adjectives with a Figurative-intensifying Noun into French. Research in Language 20:4 ► pp. 305 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2023. Granularity in the Verbalization of Events and Objects [Studies in Language Companion Series, 233], DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 4 may 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.