The development of synthetic compounds in German: Relating diachrony with L1 acquisition

Abstract

The development of synthetic compounds with deverbal heads in German, namely nominalizations with ung (such as Kindererziehung ‘child education’) and the nominalized infinitive (such as Eierlegen ‘laying of eggs’) has not been studied for language acquisition, due to their late emergence and the poor documentation in later acquisition stages. The historical emergence of synthetic compounding has had little attention. Our aim is to bring together both ‘emergence-driven’ perspectives for investigating what formal properties of synthetic compounding can be observed from the perspective of the most frequent nominalization patterns of present-day German for abstract nouns. The theoretical comparison shows that both developments (child language development and the historical development) display an increase in morphological complexity: while both kinds of nominalizations start with simple verbs, prefix and particle verbs follow. In a next step, the nominalization patterns are widened in favor of complex bases.