Cover not available
Article published In:
Languages in Contrast
Vol. 17:2 (2017) ► pp.183–204

Motivating an English-German contrast in word-formation

 | Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
German has a set of nouns which are derived from a combination of a preposition and the reciprocal pronoun einander ‘one another’. Compounds of this type are strikingly absent from English, although all the components that enter the German formations are available in English, as well. This paper takes a closer look at the relevant word-formation patterns, focusing on compounding and different types of conversion, also taking into account the diachrony of reciprocal pronouns (einander in German and each other/one another in English) and the role of morphological schemas. It will be argued that for explaining the lack of English nouns corresponding to the German nouns under discussion contrasts in the history and the grammar of reciprocals are less relevant than (i) the availability of well-entrenched word-formation patterns, and (ii) the more significant role of ‘syntactic conversion’ in German.
Keywords: compounding, conversion, word-formation, English/German
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Word-formation in English and German
    • 2.1Compounding
    • 2.2Conversion
    • 2.3Problems of delimitation
  • 3.The status of PREP-einander nouns
    • 3.1The case of Miteinander, Nebeneinander and Durcheinander
      • 3.1.1Semantics
      • 3.1.2Morphosyntax
  • 4.Explaining the contrast
    • 4.1Scenario 1: Contrasts in the expression of reciprocity
    • 4.2Scenario 2: Schemas
      • 4.2.1English
      • 4.2.2German
  • 5.Discussion: PREP-einander compounds and English-German contrasts in word-formation
    • 5.1Conversion
    • 5.2Compounding
  • 6.Summary
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 September 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.17.2.02haa
References (39)
References
Bauer, L. 1983. English Word-formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2011. Compounds and minor word-formation types. In The Handbook of English Linguistics, B. Aarts and A. McMahon (eds), 483–506. London: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Berg, T. 1998. The incompatibility of morpheme orders and lexical categories and its historical implications. English Language and Linguistics 21: 245–262. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Berg, T., Helmer, S., Neubauer, M., and Lohmann, A. 2012. Determinants of the extent of compound use: A contrastive analysis. Linguistics 501: 269–303. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Booij, G. 2010. Construction Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Botha, R. 1981. A Base Rule Theory of Afrikaans Synthetic Compounding. In The Scope of Lexical Rules, M. Moortgat, H. v.d. Hulst and T. Hoekstra (eds), 1–77. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Bybee, J. 2010. Language, Usage and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carstairs-McCarthy, A. 2002. An Introduction to English Morphology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Donalies, E. 2011. Basiswissen deutsche Wortbildung. Tübingen: Francke.Google Scholar
Dudenredaktion. 2000. Duden: Die deutsche Rechtschreibung, 22nd ed. Mannheim: Dudenverlag.Google Scholar
. 2005. Duden: Die Grammatik, 5th ed. Mannheim: Dudenverlag.Google Scholar
Eisenberg, P. 2004. Grundriss der deutschen Grammatik: Das Wort, 2nd ed. Stuttgart: Metzler. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Erben, J. 2006. Einführung in die deutsche Wortbildungslehre, 6th ed. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag.Google Scholar
Eschenlohr, S. 1999. Vom Nomen zum Verb: Konversion, Präfigierung und Rückbildung im Deutschen. Hildesheim/Zürich/New York: Georg Olms Verlag.Google Scholar
Fischer, O. 2007. Morphosyntactic Change: Formal and Functional Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Fleischer, W. and Barz, I. 2012. Wortbildung der deutschen Gegenwartssprache, 4th ed. Berlin: de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gast, V. 2008. V-N compounds in English and German. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 561: 269–282. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gast, V. and Haas, F. 2008. On reflexive and reciprocal readings of anaphors in German and other European languages. In Reciprocity and Reflexivity Theoretical and Typological Explorations, E. König and V. Gast (eds), 307–346.Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Grimm, J. and Grimm, W. 1854–1961. Deutsches Wörterbuch. Leipzig.Google Scholar
Haas, F. 2010. Reciprocity in English: Historical Development and Synchronic Structure. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Haselow, A. 2011. Typological Changes in the Lexicon: Analytic Tendencies in English Noun Formation. Berlin: de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hiltunen, R. 1983. The Decline of the Prefixes and the Beginning of the English Phrasal Verb: The Evidence from some Old and early Middle English Texts. Turku/Helsinki: Turun Yliopiso.Google Scholar
Itkonen, E. 2005. Analogy as Structure and Process. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kastovsky, D. 2006. Vocabulary. In A History of the English Language, R. Hogg and D. Denison (eds), 199–270. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kemmer, S. 1993. The Middle Voice. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Koehn, P. 2005. Europarl: A parallel corpus for statistical machine translation. MT Summit 51: 79–86.Google Scholar
König, E. and Gast, V. 2012. Understanding English-German Contrasts, 3rd ed. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag.Google Scholar
Lehmann, C. 2008. Roots, stems and word classes. Studies in Language 321: 546–567. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lieber, R. 2009. IE, Germanic: English. In The Oxford Handbook of Compounding, R. Lieber and P. Stekauer (eds), 357–369. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lohde, M. 2006. Wortbildung des modernen Deutschen. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar
Marchand, H. 1969. The Categories and Types of Present-day English Word Formation. München: Beck.Google Scholar
Oxford English Dictionary. Available online at [URL] [last accessed 2 June 2016]
Plank, F. 2008. Thoughts on the origin, progress, and pro status of reciprocal forms in Germanic, occasioned by those of Bavarian. In Reciprocity and Reflexivity Theoretical and Typological Explorations, E. König and V. Gast (eds), 347–373.Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Raffelsiefen, R. 1998. Semantic stability in derivationally related words. In Historical linguistics 1995, volume 2, R. M. Hogg and L. van Bergen (eds), 247–267. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schmid, H.-J. 2011. English Morphology and Word-Formation: An Introduction. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag.Google Scholar
2015. The scope of word-formation research. In Word-Formation. An International Handbook of the Languages of Europe. Vol. I1. (Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft / Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science (HSK) 40/1), P. O. Müller, I. Ohnheiser, S. Olsen and F. Rainer (eds), 1–21. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Schröder, A. 2011. On the Productivity of Verbal Prefixation in English: Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar
Vogel, P.M. 1996. Wortarten und Wortartenwechsel: Zu Konversion und verwandten Erscheinungen im Deutschen und in anderen Sprachen. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wiemer, B. and Nedjalkov, V. P. 2007. Reciprocal and reflexive constructions in German. In Reciprocal Constructions, V. P. Nedjalkov (ed.), 455–512. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Koutsoukos, Nikos
2021. Denominal verb formationin English and Modern Greek. Languages in Contrast 21:1 ► pp. 138 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 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.