GERMAN COMPOUND NOUNS WITH A VERBAL COMPONENT: SEMANTIC AND PARADIGMATIC ANALYSIS

Abstract

As one of the most productive ways of vocabulary acquisition, word compounding is characterised in German as an active process that allows not only to create new designations, but also to clarify the existing ones and to express the maximum of meaning with one unit. Such units include composites with the V + N model, which have been examined on the material of three styles (belletristic, publicistic and scientific). The combination of traditional and quantitative methods in the study allows us to speak of greater evidence of the data obtained. For example, the chi-square criterion helps us determine the existence of a stable connections between the components of a complex unit, the correlation coefficient K shows its degree, and the correlation coefficient r reveals paradigmatic relationships. 
The study has revealed that the lexico-sematic subclasses (LSS) of verbs in the models under study are characterised by high unit productivity, unlike nouns, which tend to have a quantitatively large filling of subclasses. Thus, the limited but active toolkit of determinants clarifies, explains, and supplements the meaning of the main words. At the model level, a stable connection was established for: LSS of verbs "Location" + LSS of nouns "Buildings and structures", LSS of verbs "Sound and communication" + LSS of nouns "Language, speech". At the same time, the verbs of the LSSs "Processing of an object" and "Movement" are perhaps the most important for the analysed construction as they demonstrated the largest number of word uses among the subclasses and combinations in the word-formation models; in combination with the LSSs of nouns, stable connections in them have been recorded; the correlation analysis also confirmed the presence of paradigmatic relations both among themselves (the closest relation) and as part of a larger grouping.