This thesis looks from a historical perspective at the morphological-semantic motivation of words denoting persons with foreign suffixes that have been borrowed into and also formed in German, whereby, among other things, the role of motivation in relation to the borrowing and retention of lexical items is elucidated. In a theoretical section peculiarities and problems in the word formation of loan items are discussed, and motivation is defined as a synchronous-semantic category. In the analysis words denoting persons that have seven different foreign suffixes, deriving principally from Latin, are examined with material primarily from dictionaries. The study shows that especially for the frequent suffixes in German there is a consistently large proportion of motivated words. It is generally the case that the words are motivated on their first appearance in the material, and changes in their motivation are on the whole infrequent. The analysis further proves that motivated formations often disappear from the material, and words are mostly retained after the loss of their motivation. The reason that the words for the most part are motivated in German when borrowed, is that suffixed words denoting persons are generally closely related in their semantic structure to another word in the original or donor language. In German, a relatively large proportion of motivated formations for one suffix does not always correlate with high frequency or with high productivity of the suffix. Furthermore, many of the words examined do not belong to the common vocabulary, which restricts their motivation from a socio-linguistic point of view and can to some extent contribute to their disappearance.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-390 |
| Date | January 1999 |
| Creators | Dillström, Sibylle |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Tyska institutionen, Uppsala : Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | German |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Doctoral thesis, comprehensive summary, info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | Studia Germanistica Upsaliensia, 0585-5160 ; 39 |
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