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Accounting for the semantic extension of derived action nouns1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2010

ALAN K. SCOTT
ALAN K. SCOTT*
Affiliation:
University of Nottingham
*
Author's address: Department of German, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK[email protected]
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Abstract

This paper examines the German action nouns derived with the suffix -ung which have acquired an additional sense denoting either the result of the action (e.g. Veröffentlichung ‘publishing (action)’+‘publication (object)’, or a concrete referent connected with the action in some other way, e.g. Bewachung ‘guarding (action)’+‘group of people who guard’. The phenomenon is analysed as a (non-prototypical) type of polysemy; a monosemic approach fails to explain the cases in which the referent of the additional senses of the nouns is established and/or idiosyncratic. The action nouns acquire extra senses as a way of ensuring economy in the morphological system as this avoids the need for large numbers of derivational affixes, each with an individual function. An unexpected implication of the findings is that the nouns studied – abstract nouns which acquire a second, often concrete sense – move against the accepted direction of semantic change, in which items with a specific sense acquire a more general sense.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , November 2010 , pp. 711 - 734
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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Footnotes

[1]

Early versions of this paper were presented at CamLing 2006 (University of Cambridge), LangUE 2006 (University of Essex), LAEL 2006 (Lancaster University) and the LAGB Annual Meeting 2006 (University of Newcastle upon Tyne). I would like to thank the participants of these conferences, as well as the two anonymous JL referees, for helpful suggestions. The research for this paper was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

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