Veggie-Renate und Merci-Jens

Abstract This paper investigates personal name compounds (PN compounds) with a personal name in the second position and a lexeme or a proper name as a modifier (cf. Veggie-Renate). Based on 1194 types from the web corpus of the Digitales Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache (DWDS) and Twitter, the paper aims at testing the following hypotheses from the previous studies (Wildgen 1981, Kürschner 2020): PN compounds are infrequent, irregular and bear mainly an evaluative function. By drawing on the semantic relations holding between the components of nominal compounds in German (cf. Ortner et al. 1991), we provide evidence for 15 regular semantic patterns underlying PN compounds. However, these patterns cannot fully account for the properties of PN compounds as the patterns are too abstract and neglect the contextual factors and extra-linguistic knowledge about the name bearer. Therefore, to arrive at the properties of PN compounds, semantic patterns must be pragmatically enriched in the context by taking into account the linguistic knowledge about the modifier, the linguistic context and knowledge about the name bearer that is not included in the semantic pattern. Furthermore, apart from their evaluative function, PN compounds also evoke knowledge about the name bearer’s appearance, function, occupation, origin or participation in a social event. Finally, the analysis indicates a large frequency of PN compounds in DWDS and Twitter compared to the German Reference Corpus (DeReKo).