The Diachronic Change of German Nominalization Patterns: An Increase in Prototypicality

This paper aims at accounting for the emergence and loss of constraints governing the formation of deverbal nominalizations in German from a cognitive point of view. Specifically, diachronic changes in the formation of derivatives in the suffix -ung are investigated on the basis of two large corpora of Middle High German (MHG, 1050-1350) and Early New High German (ENHG, 1350-1650) texts, respectively. Employing the key notions of construal (e.g. Verhagen, 2007) and mental scanning (e.g. Langacker, 1987) and adopting a usage-based perspective, this paper demonstrates that the diachronic change of word formation patterns can be explained in terms of basic principles of human cognition. It is shown that the emergence of word formation constraints affecting ungnominalization can be attributed to an increase in (lexical-categorial) prototypicality: Numerous frequent word formation products in -ung adopt features of more prototypical nouns by means of lexicalization throughout the ENHG period. This change eventually affects the word formation pattern itself, blocking the formation of more “verby”, i.e. processual, ung-nominals and rendering a variety of previously felicitous derivatives ungrammatical. This development is paralleled by a loss of constraints affecting the competing word formation pattern of Infinitival Nominalization, which comes in as a “replacement process” (Barz, 1998) for ung-nominalization.