5 Synthetic compounds in German
Martin Neef · 2025
The term “synthetic compound” is used for different concepts in the pertinent linguistic literature. This article regards as synthetic compounds complex words of at least three morphemes, where neither the combination of the first two nor of the last two forms an existing free word. Synthetic compounds are typical for West Germanic languages. Different kinds of analyses in different theoretical frameworks have been proposed, some of which are to be discussed in the following. In general, synthetic compounds do not form a genuine morphological category, but can be attributed to other well-established categories.