Konsequenzen der "los"-Suffigierung im Deutschen: Korpushäufigkeit, emotional-affektive Effekte und konstruktionsgrammatische Perspektiven

Abstract

Based on the privative derivational suffix -los, we test statements found in the literature on word formation using a – at least in this field – novel empirical basis: a list of affective-emotional ratings of base nouns and associated -los derivations. In addition to a frequency analysis based on the German Reference Corpus, we show that, in general, emotional polarity (so-called valence, positive vs. negative emotions) is reversed by suffixation with -los. This change is stronger for more polarized base nouns. The perceived intensity of emotion (so-called arousal) is generally lower for -los derivations than for base nouns. Finally, to capture the results theoretically, we propose a prototypical -los construction in the framework of Construction Morphology.

Introducing DeReKoGram: A novel frequency dataset with lemma and part- of-speech information for German

“…We give pointers on how to back-translate the integer codes (see Section 2 for an explanation) to human-readable wordforms and lemmas, aggregate, lower (i.e. transform all characters to lower-case), and clean the dataset and search for speci c patterns based on a linguistic example from Wolfer & Hein (2022). For Python, we also show how to train smoothed n-gram language models with DeReKoGram.…”