CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC AS THE SOURCE OF THE GERMAN COMPOUND WORDS

Abstract

Purpose. This article deals with German compounding as one of the most productive forms of word formation of nouns in the time of the coronavirus pandemic. This article aims to take into account the types of compounding, to determine the structural-semantic characteristics of compounds, and to describe existing semantic transformations. It is necessary to solve the following tasks: 1) to compose a corpus of composite, 2) to study their structural and semantic features and 3) to determine the existing semantic transformations of research units.

Methods. The methodological framework of our empirically supported study includes text analysis for the preparation of the list of compounds, the methods of historical word formation research to research the type of compounding and the structure of the compound words, the semantic analysis for determining the meaning of the selected compounds and the conceptual analysis to determine their semantic transformations.

Results. Word formation is one of the most productive ways of word building in German language. In modern German compound words are written: together according to classical grammar, through a hyphen (s), each component with a capital letter or separately and with capital letters as in English.The analysis of the compound words made it possible to determine some tendencies of compounding in a coronavirus pandemic: 1) compounding is particularly productive in the noun area, the most productive is the two-part structure N. + N.; 2) the compounds contain borrowings from English, Greek, Italian (Latin) and French as constituents; 3) prefixoids and prefixes become an important part of the formation of new compounds; 4) many compounds of the coronavirus pandemic have different types of short words as a constituent. We distinguish between the following types of compounds: 1) determinative compounds, 2) possessive compounds, 3) contamination, and 4) phrasal compounds. Determinative compounds form the largest group. Most compounds are neologisms. In our corpus, there are both compounds with a direct meaning as well as compounds that are conceptual metaphors or metonymies, occasional words.

Conclusions. The study has shown at a glance which tendencies are present in German compounding during a coronavirus pandemic period. The compound words have been analyzed from their structure and their semantics. The perspective of future research lies in the versatile contrastive analysis of the compounds in contemporary German and contemporary Ukrainian; in the sensible use of compound words in foreign language teaching.