Interfixation in German compounds: what factors govern acceptability judgements?
Gary Libben, Monika Susanne Boniecki, Marlies Martha · 2009
Compounding in German is an extremely productive word formation process. While the majority of German biconstituent compounds are formed through the concatenation of unsuffixed roots, many left constituents in German require the presence of an interfix. This brings structural complexity into what might otherwise be considered a relatively simple morphological structure. For the noun-noun German compounds that we examine, at least five interfixation patterns are discernable. Our goal was to investigate which factors may be at play in native speakers’ determinations of whether a given compound contains the correct interfixation pattern. We employed a wellformedness judgement task in which participants were required to decide, as quickly as possible, whether the compound presented on the computer screen was a well-formed German compound. Our findings reveal that, among the five interfixation patterns, uninterfixed structures, and those with the-ninterfix are the most likely to be judged acceptable. Compound frequency as well as the positional family size of the initial constituent and the number of compounds sharing the