Edited by Günter Radden, Klaus-Michael Köpcke, Thomas Berg and Peter Siemund
Meaning does not reside in linguistic units but is constructed in the minds of the language users. Meaning construction is an on-line mental activity whereby speech participants create meanings on the basis of underspecified linguistic units. The construction of meaning is guided by cognitive… read more
Edited by Hubert Cuyckens, Thomas Berg, René Dirven † and Klaus-Uwe Panther
This volume contributes to the now one-century old question, ‘Is the link between forms and meanings in language essentially arbitrary, as Saussure put it, or is it on the contrary also considerably motivated?’ The greater part of the papers (Sections 1–3) analyze linguistic phenomena in which not… read more
While the contextually determined alternation of the velar and palatal fricatives [x] and [ç] is highly similar in Greek and German, the directionality of assimilation is strikingly different. Whereas Greek opts for anticipatory assimilation, perseveratory assimilation prevails in German.… read more
As one of the most robust typological findings, the suffixing preference captures the empirical observation that grammatical categories are more likely to be coded by suffixes than by prefixes. The goal of this contribution is to explore the effects that this asymmetry may have on the… read more
Most languages which code possession morphologically do so by using either prefixes or suffixes. This study examines the minority of languages which employ both prefixes and suffixes in order to express the contrast between alienable and inalienable possession. The focus is on a possible… read more
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… read more
This paper is the final instalment in a series of studies investigating the modification patterns in complex noun phrases (NPs) in English. It particularly focuses on the modification of two-noun compounds by three attributive adjectives. An analysis of all such NPs from the BNC reveals a strong… read more
This study seeks to determine the relative position of derivational affixes on the lexicon-grammar continuum in English. Its major claim is that the set of prefixes is rather more lexical and the set of suffixes rather more grammatical in nature. This hypothesis is supported by a battery of ten… read more
With linguistics suffering from increasing fractionalization, it is necessary not to lose sight of the overall picture. It seems uncontroversial that the study of language consists of the following five components: processing, use, structure, variation, and change. While some of the relationships… read more
This paper compares the cohesiveness of English and German compounds. Cohesiveness is understood as the extent to which two given elements are integrated into a larger structural unit. The null hypothesis according to which the compounds in the two languages are equicohesive is rejected on the… read more
