Nominale Wortbildungen und Fügungen mit 'super'. Ein korpusbasierter Vergleich

This article presents a corpus-based investigation of the factors that co-vary in contemporary written German with the use of nominal word formations and syntagms construed with super, such as Superteam and super Team. The alternating constructions Super-N and super + N are studied on the basis of a statistical analysis with regard to six variables which capture semantic, etymological, text-linguistic and morphosyntactic features of both constructions. The data consist of 1000 occurrences (500 for each construction) drawn from the Deutsches Referenzkorpus (DeReKo). The results indicate that the two alternative constructions are significantly associated with four variables: semantic class, determination, attributive modification and the nature of reference (concrete vs. abstract). Conversely, neither the length of the text nor the etymology of the base word are significant factors in the alternation in statistical terms.