Modeling the properties of German phrasal compounds within a usage-based constructional approach

This paper discusses phrasal compounds in German (e.g. “Man-muss-doch-über-
alles-reden-können”-Credo, ‘one-should-be-able-to-talk-about-everything motto’).
It provides the first empirically based investigation and description of this word-
formation type within the theoretical framework of construction grammar. While
phrasal compounds pose a problem for “traditional” generative approaches, I ar-
gue that a usage-based constructional model (e.g. Langacker 1987; Goldberg 2006)
which takes into consideration aspects of frequency provides a suitable approach
to modeling and explaining their properties. For this purpose, a large inventory
of phrasal compounds was extracted from the German Reference Corpus (DeReKo)
and modeled as pairings of form and meaning at different levels of specificity and
abstractness within a bottom-up process.
Overall, this paper not only presents a new and original approach to phrasal com-
pounds, but also offers interesting perspectives for dealing with composition in
general.