Complex nominal phrases containing proper names in German and in German-English-Dutch comparison from a synchronic and diachronic perspective

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Barbara Schlücker
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics ; Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: from 2013 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 247982918

The aim of the project is a comprehensive description and analysis of proper name compounding in present-day German, both from a semantic-functional and a morphosyntactic viewpoint. In particular, the project focuses on compounds with modifiers that have a determining or rather identifying function with regard to the reference of the head, such as in 'Dortmund bestätigt Götze-Wechsel zu Bayern' ('Dortmund confirms Götze transfer to Bayern') or 'Sie legte Blumen am Kant-Grab nieder' ('She laid down flowers at the Kant tomb'). Such compounds have rarely been considered in the literature. Their specific semantic and functional properties raise various questions which concern not only their semantic-functional analysis but also the issue of cross-linguistic comparison and language contact, their diachronic development and aspects of grammatical theory. For this reason, the aim of the project is to analyse the semantic-functional and morphosyntactic properties of these compounds in present-day language as well as the development of this - presumably rather young - subtype of nominal compounding on the basis of corpus data. Of particular interest is the question of the English influence on the German construction, also from a contrastive perspective with Dutch. However, besides the subject of proper name compounds the project will also take into account other kinds of nominal constructions that contain a proper name (although not as head). This has to do with the idea that such constructions, for instance the genitive or constructions with prepositional phrases, and their specific restrictions may have played a role in the process of the historical development of proper name compounds. Finally, proper name compounds are to be discussed from the perspective of grammatical theory as an exemplary case study with regard to the relation between morphology, syntax and the lexicon.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants