Preliminary Guidelines on Noun Word Formation in the RUEG Corpus (German)

Annotation Purpose

The purpose of this annotation is to gain insight into the composition of morphologically complex nouns. The annotations identify transparent⁽¹⁾ word-formation (WF) processes and their constituents. Therefore, they contain four levels of information:

1. each individual morpheme (lemma for free forms, form representation for bound morphemes) within the complex noun
2. each word-formation process of the intermediate complex constituent(s) up to the complex lexeme
3. the category of each word-formation process
4. the order and hierarchy of all involved word-formation processes

⁽¹⁾Even when taking a synchronous perspective on word formation, one must consider the diachronic perspective at times, breaking down the etymology of a word. The difficulty then is to not carry the analysis too far down the historical road. Considering only synchronically transparent formation processes and morphemes helps with this issue. Borderline cases are discussed and documented (see e.g. lemma = "Fischen").