Motivating an English-German contrast inword-formation

Florian Haas

2nd April 2012

1 IntroductionSpeakers of German are all familiar with a small set of words which are derivedfrom the combination of a preposition and the ‘reciprocal pronoun’ einander ‘one an-other’: Miteinander ‘cooperation’1, Durcheinander ‘chaos’, Nebeneinander ‘peacefulco-occurrence’. In fact, German speakers are familiar with more words of this type,the ones just mentioned are particularly revealing, however. They are very commonand not restricted to a particular text type. For example, in the issues of MannheimerMorgen from 2009, a regional daily newspaper, the noun Miteinander appears as fre-quently as Beisammensein ‘get-together’, a slightly less abstract noun with a similarmeaning (Miteinander 396 hits, Beisammensein 365 hits). We are therefore talkingabout a formation type that is not peripheral in the sense of sounding “non-German”.The existence of these nouns is interesting for a number of reasons. First, the reciprocalpronoun einander is not used nominally on its own (*das Einander ‘the one another’).Second, in English we encounter a striking lack of such formations. This is particu-larly surprising because English possesses all the source expressions that are neededfor the respective words (prepositions and reciprocal pronouns comparable to Germaneinander). This lack of words like Durcheinander, Nebeneinander and Miteinander inEnglish will be the riddle that I hope to solve in the remainder of this paper, relating itto more general contrasts between German and English.

The structure of the paper is the following: In section 2, I will introduce somebackground from the study of English and German word-formation. Especially theconcept of conversion, treated differently in various traditions, will receive a good dealof attention. With the relevant theoretical distinctions in mind, I will then discuss thestatus of the complex nouns Durcheinander, Nebeneinander and Miteinander. Section3 will deal with the English-German contrast introduced above: English does not havesuch complex nouns, while German does. After discarding an apparent motivationfor this contrast, I will motivate it by invoking the notion of analogy. In Section 4,an attempt will be made at relating the rather specific findings of Section 3 to moregeneral questions concerning English and German word-formation. Section 5 sums upthe findings of the study.

1The English translations are rather crude and will be qualified in what follows.

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2 The problem

2.1 Word-formation in German and EnglishIt is not surprising that, as two historically related languages, German and Englishdo not differ remarkably in their inventory of word-formation strategies. In fact, al-though the inflectional morphology of Present-day English is much poorer than mod-ern German inflection, there are no major differences between English and Germanlexical morphology [cf. König/Gast neue Auflage?]. For our purposes, i.e. explainingthe (non-)formation of preposition-reciprocal compounds (henceforth ‘Prep-Recip’),the strategies of compounding and conversion appear to be the most promising word-formation types to look at.

2.1.1 Compounding

Compounding is firmly established in English as well as German lexical morphology.Compounding in German (cf. Fleischer and Barz (2012) for an overview), is describeda highly productive process including all kinds of combinations of bases. The sameholds of English, where compounding has remained one of the main word-formationprocesses, despite the fact that, in contrast to Old English, borrowing has become an-other common strategy of naming new concepts (cf. Kastovsky (2006) on historicalaspects). In order to identify contrasts between English and German compounding, wehave to go beyond such general statements. The two areas that I consider promisingin this respect are: (i) compounds that involve prepositions as first elements, whichare (and have been, cf. section 3.3 below for historical remarks) more productive inGerman than in English; (ii) univerbation, which turns out to be the process giving riseto our three complex words under discussion, seems to have been more readily appliedto frequent German syntagms than to English ones in the recent history of the two lan-guages. In this section I elaborate on these two issues, relating them to our case studylater.

Before I go on treating Durcheinander, Miteinander and Nebeneinander as com-pounds, it should be made clear that they do not actually qualify as what is classicallycalled ’compound’. Complex words can come about in two ways: (i) speakers con-sciously combining two (or more) stems on the basis of word-formation patterns (or‘rules’) available in their language, in order to name a concept; (ii) groups of wordsthat frequently co-occur in speech come to be perceived as single units (‘univerba-tion’). Traditionally, only type (i) is called ‘compounding’ (on German cf. Eisenberg2004: 233-234). Fleischer and Barz (2012: 87) consider these cases to be conversionsof phrases (see also Donalies 2011: 97). The boundary between these two types ofcomplex words is not always easy to draw, especially if one concentrates on the result-ing expressions and their status, as opposed to how they have developed (cf. Eisenberg2004: 234). The three German nouns we are interested in originate in univerbation ofphrases like through each other, with each other, besides each other leading to adverbs(cf. Fleischer and Barz 2012: 372).

What looks like the general pattern Prep+X (i.e. a preposition combining with asecond element of any word class) in German actually comprises a number of arguablydistinct types of structure, especially as far as verbs are concerned. Separable prefixesare commonly distinguished from particles, for instance. But after all, there is a patterncontaining prepositions (or ‘particles’ homonymous to prepositions) that can serve aanalogical attractor for the formation of new lexemes. As we see later, this is different

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in English. The following examples show the German structures that involve an initialpreposition (Eisenberg 2004: 254-269):

(1) a. durch-leiden ‘suffer’; lit. ‘through-suffer’b. über-streichen ‘paint over’; lit. ‘over-paint’; durch-fahren ‘drive through’;

lit. ‘through-drive’c. an-kleben ‘stick (to)’; lit. ‘on-stick’; mit-nehmen ‘take along’; lit. ‘with-

take’

The three types above represent an increase in morphosyntactic independence of theinitial preposition from (1a) to (1c). In fact, the first parts of the words in (1a) and (1b)are called often called ‘verbal prefixes’ and ‘prepositional prefixes’ respectively, thetype in (1c) involving a ‘verbal particle’. This is not the place to discuss the grammarof these expressions in any detail. For our purposes, suffice it to say that however wewant to call these expressions, they are very often homophonous with prepositions and,together with the second element, therefore serve as an analogical attractor for furthercomplex words beginning with a preposition. Note that this also holds for type (1c);although the particle is separated from the verbal base in its finite form (Ich nehmedich mit ‘I’ll take you along’, as opposed to Ich kann dich nicht mitnehmen ‘I can’ttake you along’), all non-finite forms of these verbs feed the large set of verb formsbeginning with prepositions which German speakers are exposed to. Many of theseverbs are lexicalized, yet some of the “prefixes” can be transparently combined withverbal bases in a productive way.

Many of these complex verbs have given rise to nominalizations, adding to the setof nouns that display a preposition in initial position. A selection of the latter class,involving the prepositions durch ‘through’ (cf. (2a)), mit ‘with’ ((cf. (2b)) and neben‘beside’ (cf. (2c)) is given in the following:

(2) a. Durchblick ‘knowledge’, lit. ‘through-view’; Durchblutung ‘circulation (ofthe blood)’, lit. ‘through-bleeding’; Durchbruch ‘breakthrough’; Durch-fahrt ‘way through’, lit. ‘through-ride’; Durchfall ‘diarrhoea’, lit. ‘through-fall’; Durchmesser ‘diameter’, lit. ‘through-measure’ Durchreise ‘journeythrough’, lit. ‘through-journey’; Durchsage ‘announcement’, lit. ‘through-say’.

b. Mitarbeit ‘collaboration’, lit. ‘withwork’; Mitbestimmung ‘participation’,lit. ‘with-determination’, Mitbewohner(in) ‘flatmate’, lit. ‘with-occupier’;Mitbürger ‘fellow citizen’, lit. ‘with-citizen’; Mitgefühl ‘sympathy’, lit.‘with-feeling’, Mitglied ‘member’, lit. ‘with-part’; Mitleid ‘compassion’,lit. ‘with-sorrow’; Mitschüler(in) ‘classmate’, lit. ‘with-student’; Mitver-fasser ‘co-author’, lit. ‘with-author’; Mitwirkung ‘involvement’, lit. ‘with-effect’.

c. Nebenbedeutung ‘secondary meaning’, lit. ‘beside-meaning’; Nebenein-gang ‘side entrance’, lit. ‘beside-entrance’, Nebeneinkünfte ‘supplemen-tary income’, lit. ‘beside-income’; Nebenfach ‘minor subject’, lit. ‘beside-subject’; Nebenfluss ‘tributary’, lit. ‘side-river’; Nebenrolle ‘supportingrole’, lit. ‘beside-role’; Nebensache ‘trifle’, lit. ‘beside-thing’, Nebensai-son ‘low season’, lit. ‘side-season’, Nebentätigkeit ‘extra job’, lit. ‘side-job’

All of the lexemes in (2) are stressed on the first syllable and thus on the prepositionalpart of the compound. It should also be noted that the prepositions, durch in (2a), mit

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in (2b) and neben in (2c), are always morphologically transparent, i.e. they have notundergone any process of fusion or reduction. It is plausible to assume that this is dueto the meaning contribution of the preposition being still rather transparent in many ofthese cases (on the correlation between morphological and semantic transparency in thecase of derivation see Raffelsiefen 1998). For this reason, I expect the ubiquity of lex-emes involving the relevant prepositions in first position to contribute to the strength ofthe representation of the pattern Prep-X in German, irrespective of whether the seman-tic contribution of the preposition is transparent or not. To sum up, the end-products ofall these processes follow a pattern that cannot only be described as a word-formationpattern, but is also likely to be construed as such by speakers of modern German. Inother words, speakers of German know hundreds of complex nouns, verbs, adjectivesand adverbs that have the structure Prep+X. The fact that many (or all) of these wordsgo back to univerbation and not to “regular” compounding is not necessarily part ofspeakers’ knowledge. As will be discussed in more detail below, English does not of-fer such a pattern. It is therefore more difficult for English prepositions to become thefirst elements of lexicalized compounds.

2.2 ConversionDifferent subtypes of conversion are clearly more productive in English than in Ger-man, which is in part due to the availability of derivational affixes fulfilling the corre-sponding functions in German. In fact, conversion has been described as a “specificallyEnglish process” (Marchand 1969: 363-364). The following examples include sometypical patterns of conversion in PDE:

(3) a. adjective > verb: brown; ‘to brown the meat’b. verb > noun: call; ‘to make a call’c. noun > verb: access; ‘You can access this file with following password’d. preposition > verb, noun: to up the stakes; ups and downs

Descriptions of conversion from adverbs in English rarely go beyond the mentioningof one or two isolated examples such as the ups and downs (cf. Bauer 1983: 230).The possibility of converting adverbs into nouns is thus acknowledged, but the pro-ductivity of this process remains unclear. Given the dearth of examples referred toin the literature, it seems, however, that the nominalization of adverbials is not verycommon. Apart from the lack of documentation in this area, another problem has to befaced: Not any “nominal use” of a word that does not belong to the word class of nouns(adverbs, adjectives, verbs, prepositions, conjunctions etc.) qualifies as an instance ofconversion, assuming that conversion provides us with a new lexical item (cf. Section2.3).

German conversion is not as constrained as the above quote from Marchand (1969)might suggest, however. Since the inflectional morphology of German is much richerthan that of English, one could easily overlook examples of conversion where the pres-ence of a word-class specific inflectional affix diverts one’s attention from the fact thatthe stem does not undergo any formal change. The following examples of denominalverbs, for instance, qualify as conversion, irrespective of the presence of the infinitivesuffix -(e)n (Lohde 2006: 270; Fleischer and Barz 2012: 88):

(4) a. Scherz ‘joke’ > scherzen ‘to joke’b. Salbe ‘salve > salben ‘to anoint’

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c. Fessel ‘chain’ > fesseln ‘to enchain’d. Donner ‘thunder’ > donnern ‘to thunder’

The literature on conversion in German is not in complete agreement on subtypes. Onlythose authors with a relatively wide conception of conversion would include word-classchanges that are accompanied by vowel changes, as in Kopf ‘head’ > köpfen ‘behead’(cf. Donalies 2011: 94). There is widespread agreement, however, on deverbal nounsbased on infinitive forms being a very productive and in fact the most frequent conver-sion type (cf. e.g. Lohde 2006: 45-46):

(5) a. kochen (v.) ‘cook’ > Kochen (n.) ‘cooking’b. verabschieden (v.) ‘say farewell’ > Verabschieden (n.) ‘saying farewell’

The type exemplified in (5) is so unconstrained that the question arises of whether weare still dealing with a lexical process. In fact, the option of using words which are notnouns nominally, is not restricted to infinitives.

2.3 Problems of delimitationIn both English and German, it is possible in principle to use a lexical item of anyword class in a syntactic function typically filled by nominal expressions. In termsof traditional phrase structure analysis, one may say that these items are used as NPs.This process is also available for phrases and even sentences, especially if introducedby a definite determiner. Here are some corpus examples from German newspapers inwhich the nominalized phrase (printed in bold letters) is introduced by dieses ewige. . .‘that everlasting. . . ’ (IDS corpora):

(6) a. Dieses ewige Stirb und Werde finde überall im Raum statt, schlägt derKönigsberger Philosoph vor.‘That everlasting die and become takes place everywhere in the room,the philosopher from Königsberg proposes.’ [Braunschweiger Zeitung,21.04.2008]

b. Dieses ewige Haar-in-der-Suppe-Suchen, das sollten wir beenden.‘That everlasting hair-in-the-soup-seek [=look for a fly in the ointment],we should finish it.’ [Hamburger Morgenpost, 17.12.2007]

c. Dieses ewige Blabla über Schiedsrichter kann ich nicht mehr hören.‘I can’t stand that everlasting bla bla about referees anymore’ [HamburgerMorgenpost, 14.12.2009]

d. Die Wellen schaukelten ihn in den Schlaf, und dieses ewige berg- und tal-wärts auf dem Strom versetzte ihn schon in früher Jugend in kontemplativeStimmungen und Schwingungen.‘The waves rocked him to his sleep, and that everlasting uphill and down-hill on the river caused contemplative moods and vibrations already in thedays of his early youth.’ [Mannheimer Morgen, 25.10.2003]

e. Was soll dieses ewige miteinander vergleichen von Berufsbildern, diesich zuweilen einfach nicht wirklich miteinander vergleichen lassen, [. . . ]‘What’s the use of that everlasting comparing with each other of profes-sions that can sometimes not be compared [. . . ] [Nürnberger Nachrichten,27.12.2004]

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f. [. . . ] dieses ewige “Ich will nicht!” - das erzeugt schon eine große Rei-bung.‘That everlasting “I don’t want to!”, it does cause considerable friction.’[DiePresse, 26.09.1998]

The examples in (6) include nominalized phrases of all kinds of different sources. Stirband werde in (6a) contains verbs in the imperative form. The bold-printed string in(6b) involves a transitive verb (suchen) and its object. Its OV word order could eitherbe analyzed as the regular order of German subordinate clauses, but since there is noreason for considering this a subordinate clause, it probably makes more sense to viewit as an ad-hoc formation with the structure of a synthetic compound. Blabla in example(6c) is the nominalized use of an expression that is jokingly employed to imitate aconversational contribution perceived as “hot air”. An example that more clearly showsthat the syntactically nominal slot at issue is open to basically any kind of filler is (6d).Here, berg- and talwärts are two conjoined adverbs that are not normally assumedto be members of the German class of nouns. Sentence (6e) is interesting insofar asthe nominalized string in this case includes our well-known expression miteinander.It is certainly not a noun in (6e), however. Instead, it fills two argument position ofthe complex-transitive verb vergleichen ‘compare’. The bold-printed string thereforequalifies as a verb phrase, here inserted into a nominal position. The unconstrainednature of this process in German is also nicely illustrated in the last example, (6f),where an entire sentence fits the nominal slot under discussion.

What all the cases in (6) have in common, in my view, is that no genuine word-formation process has been involved. We are rather confronted with the spontaneoususe of all kinds of linguistic material in a syntactically nominal slot, namely the headposition of a noun phrase. For lack of a better term, I will call this process ‘syntac-tic conversion’, as opposed to ‘conversion’ proper, the latter but not the former takento be a word-formation process (cf. Vogel 1996: 22-27, 247-251 et passim on whatshe calls ‘syntaktische Umkategorisierungen’). Syntactic conversions have the flavourof a (metalinguistic) ‘mention’, rather than ‘use’. To put it differently, speaker andhearer are aware that the expression at issue is used in a non-conventional way. Thisproperty makes syntactic conversion different from word-formation proper, especiallyconversion. In the latter case, we are not dealing with the spontaneous decision of us-ing something as a NP. Rather, the speaker makes use of an established lexical item,i.e. a word that is part of the lexicon and has in this way become independent of theusage conditions associated with the original lexeme. The expressions under discus-sion, nominal Durcheinander, Miteinander and Nebeneinander, perhaps started off assyntactic conversions of adverbs. Let us therefore ask how the distinction betweensyntactic conversion and conversion proper should be drawn. In the literature on Ger-man word-formation, the term ‘syntactic conversion’ (G. ‘syntaktische Konversion’)is also used in a sense similar to the one proposed here, but its extension can also bewider. Lohde (2006: 45), for instance, includes any word-class change that does notinclude lexical affixes (his preferred term is reine Konversion ‘pure conversion’). Asa consequence, he sets up a further type of conversion, Präfixkonversion ‘prefix con-version’, which denotes those cases involving derivational affixes. The conception of‘syntactic conversion’ that I have in mind here comes closer to what Eschenlohr (1999:46-50) calls syntaktische Umkategorisierung (‘syntactic recategorization’). She liststhe following properties of this kind of category change (47):

• They are productive without restrictions.

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• Their semantic interpretation is predictable.

• They have only a weak tendency to lexicalize (‘Usualisierung’) and become es-tablished in the speech community.

• They are accessible to further morphological processes such as compoundingand derivation to a limited degree only.

Although such criteria suggest a clear-cut distinction, the question of how syntacticconversion and conversion proper should be kept apart has turned out to be difficultone. ‘Lexicalization’ in the sense of a form becoming part of the lexicon is certainlycrucial (cf. Vogel 1996: 237). Lexicalization in this sense is only visible if we breakit down to more specific formal and semantic changes that a given form undergoes,therefore. In clear cases of lexicalization, both form and meaning of the lexicalizedexpression deviate from the source expression. This holds for both compounding andconversion (I ignore derivation here, begin irrelevant to the forms at issue). Inflectionoften indicates that a given expression has changed its status; assuming the inflectionalbehaviour of the new class indicates a change that goes beyond syntactic conversion.The latter preserves the original inflectional forms. On the semantic side, a complexlexicalized word has a meaning which is not derivable from the meanings of its partsalone. This does not necessarily imply that there is no relationship whatsoever betweenthe meanings of the components and the meaning of the whole. Often, the resultingmeaning is still transparently related to the source elements, but there is an additionalsemantic component that speakers have conventionally associated with the lexicalizedexpression.

2.3.1 Application to Durcheinander, Miteinander and Nebeneinander

The three words we are concerned with qualify as lexicalized in the semantic sense.Durcheinander, Miteinander and Nebeneinander have acquired meanings that go be-yond the combination of einander and the respective prepositions. The adverbs durch-einander, miteinander and nebeneinander, from which these nouns are derived, aredifferent; they may be used in, but are not restricted to, the lexicalized meaning.2 Con-sider miteinander ‘with each other’. This adverb is semantically compatible with anykind of relation that is also compatible with the comitative preposition mit (‘with’).The noun Miteinander, by contrast, is restricted in its use to a peaceful or cooperativekind of relationship. The 92 instances of the noun Miteinander in the Europarl2 cor-pus confirm this assumption. Bearing in mind that there is no watertight strategy ofoperationalising the semantic distinction at issue here, we have found no examples inthe corpus where Miteinander is clearly used to refer to a kind of relationship that isviewed negatively or as hostile. Also consider the following pair of examples. (7a) istaken from the IDS corpora and (7b) is made up as to match its real counterpart.

(7) a. Zwei Köpenicker Familien mit Kindern liegen wegen angeblich ruhestören-den Lärms seit langem miteinander im Clinch. [IDS corpora]

2Wiemer and Nedjalkov (2007: 428) (for nominal composition also Fleischer and Barz 2012: 167) namecombinations with bis ‘until’ and seit ‘since’ as exceptions, but analyze all other combinations of prepositionand einander as lexical items (see also Plank 2008). One of their arguments favouring this analysis concernsthe combination of some of these complex expressions with verbs, resulting in words like aneinanderreihen‘string together’, lit. ‘string on one another’: “That these two prefixes have merged into one morphologicalentity, is partly confirmed by the fact that the particular locative prefix and einander are separated from thestem only jointly, never one without the other.” (483)

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‘Because of allegedly disturbing noises, two families from Köpenick havefor long been at loggerheads with each other.’

b. ?Das feindliche Miteinander zweier Köpenicker Familien wegen angeblicherRuhestörung dauert schon Jahre an.‘The hostile Miteinander of two families in Köpenick, concerning allegedlydisturbing noises, has been going on for years now.’

The examples in (7) illustrate the point made above. As an adverb miteinander re-tains its compositional meaning, i.e. the preposition mit ‘with’ may be used in thesense of ‘with, against’, as in (7a), straight-forwardly combining with the reciprocaleinander ‘one another’. As soon as Miteinander is used as a noun, however, this op-tion disappears. Nominal Miteinander is banned from purely reciprocal relationshipsof a non-cooperative kind. Example (7b) sounds clearly odd therefore.

We encounter a similar situation in the case of nebeneinander ‘next to one another’.While the adverb can either describe two (or more) concrete objects that are locatednext to one another or two abstract entities that coexist in a given domain, the nounNebeneinander is restricted to the second reading. The examples in (8) should makethis clear.

(8) a. Es erlaubt den Radlern, rechts auf der Straße und sogar nebeneinander zufahren. [IDS corpora]‘It [a blue road sign] allow cyclists to drive on the right side of the road,and even side by side.’

b. ?Die neue Spur ermöglicht das Nebeneinander von zwei Radfahrern aufder Straße.‘The new lane makes it possible for two cyclists to drive side by side onthat road.’

It is impossible for Nebeneinander in (8b) to describe the concrete state of two cyclistsriding side by side. As mentioned above, it is only coexistence in some abstract domainthat goes with this noun. Thus, we could modify (8b) in such a way that two groups ofroad users and the possibility of their both using the road at the same time are referredto:

(9) Die neue Verkehrsführung macht das Nebeneinander von Autofahrern und Rad-fahrern auf dieser Straße möglich.‘The new traffic routeing makes it possible for car drivers and cyclists to usethe road together.’

Crucially, the reading of car drivers and cyclists driving side by side in a strictly localsense is excluded for (9).

To sum up, what the examples above demonstrate, therefore, is that the nominal ex-pressions under consideration differ from their adverbial source expressions in mean-ing. As a result, they should (at least synchronically, see section 4.1 below) not betreated as instances of syntactic conversion in the sense introduced above. Instead,from the point of view their synchronic semantics they <qualify as nouns that derivefrom adverbs via the word-formation process of conversion. In general, nouns basedon the pattern Prep-einander appear to have meanings that are more abstract than thoseof their adverbial counterparts. This may also explain the fact that some combina-tions are quite common as adverbs, but not at all as nouns. Whereas Durcheinander,Nebeneinander and Miteinander abound, there are hardly any occurrences of Übere-inander and Untereinander in the corpora I investigated (Europarl and the written cor-pora of the Institut für Deutsche Sprache). Taking all public corpora of the IDS archive

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of written corpora as a test case, there are 11 nominal uses of Untereinander and 57nominal uses of Übereinander, as opposed to 34,478 hits for Miteinander, 7,198 hitsfor Durcheinander and 4,974 hits for Nebeneinander (see Table 1).3 The rather con-crete local meaning of übereinander does not easily lend itself to developing a moreabstract interpretation, at least not as easily as nebeneinander. A reason might be thefollowing: The adverb übereinander ‘over/above one another’ is typically used withan asymmetric reading, i.e. it does not describe two entities each of which is abovethe other, but rather one entity A being above another entity B, the use of the recip-rocal here abstracting away from the question of who or what is on top as opposed tothe bottom. It is hard to conceive of a(n) (abstract) state that a corresponding nounÜbereinander could refer to as frequently as to make the conventionalization of thenoun possible. It appears more difficult to motivate why untereinander (‘mutually’, lit.‘below/among each other’) is hardly ever used nominally. The adverb is used to ex-press reciprocity, an indeed rather abstract meaning. Why do speakers so seldom feelthe need to refer to the abstract concept of reciprocity then? Well, they do sometimes,but in these presumably not so common situations speakers have other words at theirdisposal: Gegenseitigkeit ‘reciprocity’ and Reziprozität ‘reciprocity’. I take it to beplausible to assume that, given the restricted formal contexts where the pure conceptof reciprocity has to be named and the availability of nouns for these situations, thereis simply no need for a nominalization of untereinander.

¬ nominal nominal % nominalmiteinander 110,819 34,478 23.7durcheinander 14,832 7,198 32.6nebeneinander 15,345 4974 24.4untereinander 33,153 11 0.03übereinander 6,481 57 0.87

Table 1: Proportion of nominal uses (IDS corpora, Archive W)

Moving on to morphosyntactic properties, there are unfortunately not too manymorphosyntactic categories we can turn to when we are interested in a change from ad-verb to noun. Adverbs are, by definition, uninflected. As a consequence, there is no in-flectional category that an adverb may lose when it turns into a noun. The morphosyn-tax of the target class is more revealing in this respect: German nouns inflect for numberand case and their determiners also mark gender. Are Durcheinander, Miteinander andNebeneinander regular nouns as far as these categories are concerned, then? Regard-ing gender, determiners combining with these expressions are always neuter (one of thethree German gender values, the others being masculine and feminine). Some randomexamples from Europarl illustrate the neuter gender that determiners of einander-nounshave to take:

(10) a. Wir müssen dafür sorgen, dass das Nebeneinander von nationalen und eu-ropäischen Zeichen koordiniert wird.‘We must see to it that the coexistence of national and European signs getscoordinated.’

3For Untereinander and Übereinander all hits were checked manually. For the other three expressions,the first 200 instances of all capitalized tokens were checked manually. The percentage of non-nominal uses(adverbial uses in sentence-initial position) calculated on the basis of these 200 hits was then subtracted fromthe complete set of results.

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b. Es dürfen in Europa keine neuen Barrieren errichtet werden, die das Miteinan-der und die Zusammenarbeit mit anderen Ländern verhindern.‘We should not set up new barriers which prevent harmony and collabora-tion with other countries.’

c. Herr Präsident, das Durcheinander, das in diesem Hohen Haus vor Abstim-mungsbeginn herrscht, droht zu einem moralischen Problem zu werden.‘Mr President, the chaos that controls this house before the vote is in dangerof becoming a moral problem.’

Case, in general, is also more easily visible on determiners than on the head nounsthemselves, apart from the genitive case. Keeping this restriction in mind, all fourcases are represented in the Europarl data (Nominative in 11a, Genitive in 11b, Dativein 11c, Accusative in 11d):

(11) a. Nun wird das Nebeneinander durch einige extreme Nationalisten gefährdet.‘Now the peaceful coexistence is being threatened by some extreme nation-alists.’

b. Eine Gruppe verdient tatsächlich Anerkennung, und das sind die Beamten,die in Zeiten des Durcheinander Geduld, Verständnis und Engagementgezeigt haben.‘One group deserves respect, namely the civil servants who showed pa-tience, understanding and commitment in times of chaos.’

c. Ich spreche von dem Durcheinander bei den Sitzungs- und Terminkalen-dern im Parlament in diesem Jahr.‘I’m referring to the chaos resulting from the parliamentary schedule thisyear.’

d. Wir wünschen uns ein intelligentes Nebeneinander von Energie und Umwelt-schutz.‘We wish for a more intelligent coexistence of energy and protection of theenvironment.’

No example of a genitive marked on the noun itself was found in the Europarl data.Such forms are possible, however, as evidenced by the following examples from IDSnewspaper corpora:

(12) a. Wenn sich Helmstedt nun daran macht, die Mechanik des kalten Nebeneinan-ders von deutscher und türkischstämmiger Bevölkerung aufzubrechen, [. . . ]‘If Helmstedt sets out to break up the mechanics underlying the cold co-existence of the German population and that of Turkish descent, [. . . ]’[Braunschweiger Zeitung, 11.09.2008, IDS corpora]

b. Fragen der Gegenwart, des multikulturellen Miteinanders würden beleuchtetund zurückprojiziert auf die Zeit [. . . ].‘Questions relating to the present and to the multicultural cooperation aresaid to be investigated and projected back to the time [. . . ].’ [MannheimerMorgen, 18.09.2010, IDS corpora]

c. Die Gassen bieten ein Bild kunterbunten Durcheinanders.‘The alleys display a picture of a motley confusion.’ [OberösterreichischeNachrichten, 22.06.1996, IDS corpora]

As for number, German nouns (with the exception of one noun class including wordslike Fenster ‘window’, for which the plural is unmarked) are marked for the plural and

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unmarked for the singular. The three nouns under discussion never occur in the plural.In other words, the plural forms *Durcheinanders, *Nebeneinanders and *Miteinan-ders appear to be impossible.4 This might be taken as an argument against the fullnominal status of these words. Note, however, that the same constraint holds for oth-erwise unmistakable nouns with similar meanings. Thus, Beisammensein, Zusammen-wirken and Zusammenarbeit, which are near-synonymous with Miteinander, are notpluralizable, either. The same situation meets us when we consider Durcheinander,Nebeneinander and their near-synonyms:

(13) a. Unordnung, Gewirr ‘chaos’; ?Unordnungen, ?Gewirreb. Eintracht, Verbundenheit ‘cooperation’; ?Eintrachten, ?Verbundenheiten

Instead of viewing the non-plural constraint as a sign of incomplete nominalization, itmight make more sense, therefore, to consider it a result of the relevant words’ mean-ings. They refer to abstract states of affairs whose pluralization is not normally requiredand has therefore not become a morphological option. To be sure, it is not far-fetched,for instance, to think of various places where a state of chaos holds. At the same time,there seem to be few occasions on which it is actually necessary to refer to these statesof chaos as a set of two more entities. Returning to the issue of how Durcheinander,Miteinander and Nebeneinander behave in terms of word class membership, their lackof plural forms should thus not necessarily be taken to argue against their being nouns.

For our purposes, a crucial conclusion at this point is that Durcheinander, Miteinanderand Nebeneinander are lexicalized nouns, based on semantic and – to a lesser degree– also on morphosyntactic evidence. Even if it can be shown, therefore, that syntacticconversion is more freely available in German than in English, and even if this may playa role for the formations under discussion, it cannot be the whole explanation for theabsence of English counterparts to Durcheinander, Miteinander and Nebeneinander,or structurally similar formations. There has to be a reason for why these German ex-pressions have gone beyond the status of syntactic conversions, having developed intogenuine nouns.

3 Explaining the contrast

3.1 Why care?Why should we expect some systematic contrast between two languages if all we haveto explain seems to be a small set of nouns with a seemingly quirky structure? Inthe field of lexical morphology, even more than in the areas of inflection or syntax,we should not be surprised to encounter isolated cases with idiosyncratic properties,which will not tell us a lot about systematic contrasts between English and German.Nonetheless, it will be proposed that the contrast is more systematic. Even though onlya typological investigation taking into account all potentially relevant factors couldprovide the ultimate proof, a contrastive analysis should be able to pin down potentiallyresponsible factors. In fact, it will be seen that what I called “our small set of nounswith a seemingly quirky structure” makes part of a very general compounding patternin German that has long disappeared from English.

4To exemplify the impossibility of plural forms I have chosen the default plural suffix -s. Other pluralallomorphs are equally excluded, however.

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3.2 Contrasts in the expression of reciprocityBefore we turn to the above-mentioned explanation, let us first consider another con-ceivable scenario. Both German and English allow the combination of prepositionsand reciprocal pronouns (Prep+einander in German and Prep+each other/one anotherin English). Sentence like the following are anything but exceptional:

(14) How was it, your initial reaction to each other? [ICE-GB]

In fact, most occurrences of reciprocal expressions in English involve a preposition.Table 2 shows that the majority of reciprocals in the ICE-GB corpus follow preposi-tions: Similar proportions can be found in other corpora of Present-day English (see

Synt. function nPrep_ 68Other functions 49% Prep_ 58.1

Table 2: Proportion of source construction in English (ICE-GB)

Haas 2010: 76): It would go beyond the scope of this paper to discuss the reasons for

Synt. function LOB BROWN FLOBPrep_ 68 76 65Other functions 52 44 39% Prep_ 56.7 63.3 62.5

Table 3: Proportion of source construction in English (LOB, BROWN, FLOB)

why English reciprocals seem to feel at home in the position of prepositional comple-ment (see for instance Plank 2008: 366-369). In the context of this paper it is moreinteresting to note that the ratio of reciprocals following a preposition in German iseven higher than in English. The following are counts from the newspaper BerlinerMorgenpost and the “Wendekorpus”, including various spoken and written texts fromthe year 1989 (the first 500 instances of each corpus): A comparison of ICE-GB and

Synt. function Berl. MoPo WendekorpusPrep_ 475 444Other functions 21 56% Prep_ 95.8 88.8

Table 4: Proportion of source construction in German (MoPo and Wendekorpus)

MoPo (cf. Table 4, for instance, yields a highly significant contrast: χ2 = 128.9456, df= 1, p < 2.2e-16). We may get suspicious at this point. Have the German Prep-Recipcombinations discussed above undergone the German-only changes under discussionbecause they are simply more frequent in this combination than in English? I will re-turn to this issue below. First, however, I will outline where the higher proportion ofthe respective German structure stems from.

In order to understand this asymmetry, one has to take into account that, apart fromthe reciprocal einander, German uses the reflexive sich ‘x-self’5 in reciprocal contexts

5German sich is only inaccurately translated by the English reciprocal ending in -self, because its recip-rocal use qualifies as a ‘middle’ use in the sense of Kemmer (1993), rather than as a proper reflexive use (see

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(often causing the ambiguity visible in 15b):

(15) a. Sie haben einander fotografiert.‘They took pictures of each other.’

b. Sie haben sich fotografiert.‘They took pictures of each other/themselves.’

Two further facts have to be noted concerning the reciprocal use of German sich.Firstly, it is not allowed after prepositions, as can be seen in (16a). Secondly, thededicated reciprocal expression einander is hardly ever used in positions other thanprepositional complement in spoken German.

(16) a. Sie haben mit-einander gefeiert.‘They partied with each other.’

b. *Sie haben mit sich gefeiert.

Therefore, there results an almost complementary distribution: sich occurs in the director indirect object slot and einander is used after prepositions (see also Plank 2008:354). No such division of labor is operating in English, such that the reciprocals eachother and one another occur in all syntactic positions and thus appear to offer lessinput to entrenchment in a frame [Prep each other]. Is this the explanation for whyGerman, but not English, has developed the compound expressions under discussion?Although it would be difficult to exclude some role of this factor, it can at most be partof the explanation. It appears that this explanation is not compatible with the historicaldevelopment that has led to the present-day state.

The univerbation of different prepositions and the reciprocal einander occurredrelatively early in the history of the language. According to Plank (2008: 363-364,366-367), it can already be found in Old High German (500-1050). Compared to otherGermanic languages including English, German thus features both an early univerba-tion of the reciprocal einander and the early univerbation of the latter and a number ofprepositions. This is notable, even if in general the types and tokens of German com-pounds have become more and more general throughout the history of German (cf. Er-ben 2006: 140-143). It does not imply, however, that these expressions were convertedto nouns equally early. It is difficult to pin down exactly since when the nouns havebeen used. Note that Grimm’s dictionary does not even mention the nominal uses ofMiteinander and Nebeneinander (Durcheinander is listed; Grimm 1854-1961). Giventhat their entries on the adverbial uses of these complex expressions are quite detailed,one may suspect that some of the nominal uses are in fact a more recent development.Yet, the univerbation of preposition and reciprocal took place at a time for which it isnot clear whether the frequency asymmetry illustrated in (15) had already held. In OldHigh German the reflexive sich ‘x-self’ was not yet commonly used reciprocally (Gastand Haas 2008: 325). Therefore it is plausible to assume that einander was not yet asmuch restricted to the slot after prepositions as it is today. As convincing as it mightseem, therefore, to attribute the lack of lexicalized Prep-Recip formations in English tothe lack of a German-type frequency asymmetry described above, the historical factsmake it clear that the (near) complementary distribution of einander and sich can atmost be a strengthening factor being at work in later times. It is for this reason thatother possible reasons for the contrast should be searched for.

also Gast and Haas 2008).

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3.3 AnalogyWhat I would like to propose in what follows is that the presence or absence of a moregeneral analogical model on which preposition-initial compounds could be formed isultimately responsible for the contrast in word-formation that we are dealing with inthis paper. While such a model exists in German (and has existed for a long time),none such structure is able to support new formations in English. Analogy as it is un-derstood in this paper is a conceptual operation where speakers construct new complexexpressions because they see a structural similarity between the latter and an alreadyexisting pattern (on the role of analogy in language change see Itkonen 2005, Fischer2007: 135-155 and Bybee 2010: 66-75).6 This idea also lies at the basis of the follow-ing quote from Booij (2009: 207): “This means that the native speaker’s competenceto create new compounds and derived words is based on abstractions over sets of ex-isting complex words and the words that are paradigmatically related to them.” Let ustherefore ask if there has been a pattern on the basis of which German speakers couldhave interpreted Prep-einander combinations as compounds. Indeed, German word-formation provides exemplars on the basis of which new formations involving prepo-sitions (or ‘particles’) in initial position may be formed. In English, complex words ofthis type are much less common and thus less likely to trigger new formations. Let usfirst consider the English situation.

3.3.1 English

In descriptions of English compounding, compound nouns, verbs and adjectives (e.g.Carstairs-McCarthy 2002: 60-62) the type Prep-X, ‘X’ standing for a second elementof any word class, is not normally described as marginal or obsolete (but see Schmid2005: 128-130). In reality, however, the generality of this pattern is very limited. Tobe sure, the type Prep-V is common with a restricted group of prepositions: under,over and out; here the preposition has a metaphorical meaning ‘do in excess’ for overor ‘below the expected limit’ for under. In fact, some linguists have questioned theirstatus as prepositions, analyzing them as affixes (Lieber 2009: 365-366). The literalcounterparts to these uses, as well as a number of other prepositions as first elementsof a compound (cf. Marchand 1969: 108ff.), have become unproductive. By the 15thcent. they were largely replaced by phrasal verbs like make up (Marchand 1969: 108;Hiltunen 1983; Kastovsky 2006: 254; Berg 1998; see Schröder 2011: 64-69 and passimfor further discussion and references).

As an illustration of the situation in English, consider the following lists. (17)provides the 16 lexemes beginning with through that the Oxford English Dictionary(OED) contains and (18) offers the same result for words beginning with with.

(17) through-bear (last attested in 1857); through-gang (obs./rare); through-gird(obs.); through-go (obs.); through-light (obs.); through other (adv. phr. anda.; last attested in early 19th cent.); throughout; through-passage (last attested

6Traditionally, analogy is conceived of as a relationship between a new formation and one specific ex-isting expression, whereas forming a new word on the model of a general word-formation rule would bedescribed under the heading of productivity. The wider conception of analogy that I am following in thispaper has been chosen for the following reasons: Firstly, it is questionable whether a clear-cut distinctionbetween the two types of process mentioned above can be upheld in general for many instances of word-formation. Secondly, I could not tell for the specific case under discussion (Prep-einander) what the degreeof abstractness of the analogical model that allows speakers to form these new words is: [Prep-X], [Prep-X]N ,[mit-X], [mit-X]N . . . . The data described in this paper, and also the respective English-German contrasts,would allow for different degrees of abstraction being the model for new formations.

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in 1886); throughpost (obs.); throughput; throughseek (obs.); through-shine(obs.); through-sting (obs.); through-stone (dial., arch.); through-toll (last at-tested in 1892); throughway

(18) withdraw; withgo (obs.); withhold; withsake (obs.); withsave (obs.); withsay(obs.); withstand (arch.); withtake (obs.)

3.3.2 German

The above lists, which are not long anyway, strike us as including almost only obsoletewords. This contrasts with the situation in German, where the corresponding prepo-sitions durch ‘through’ and mit are frequent first parts in compounds. (19) provides aselection of the 204 lexemes that are listed in the Duden (2000):

(19) durchaus ‘absolutely’, durchbeißen ‘struggle through’, durchblättern ‘to leafthrough’, Durchblick ‘clear vision’, Durchblutung ‘blood circulation’, durchboxen‘push through’, Durchbruch ‘breakthrough’, durchbrennen ‘burn through’, durchdrehen‘blow a fuse’, Durchfahrt ‘crossing’, Durchfall ‘diarrhoea’, durchforsten ‘combthrough’, durchführen ‘accomplish’, durchgängig ‘continuous’, durchgeben‘announce’, durchhalten ‘hang on’, durchhängen ‘be in a slump’, durchlaufen‘run through’, Durchmesser ‘diameter’, Durchreise ‘journey through’, Durchsage‘announcement’, durchschnittlich ‘average’, durchtanzen ‘dance through’, durchziehen‘go through with’

For mit ‘with’ as a first element, the Duden lists 90 lexemes, excluding archaic words.(20) again provides a selection:

(20) Mitarbeit, mitbekommen ‘notice’, Mitbestimmung ‘participation’, Mitbewohner(in)‘flatmate’, mitbringen ‘bring along’, Mitbürger ‘fellow citizen’, mitdenken ‘tofollow somebody’s line of argument’, miterleben ‘witness’, mitfahren ‘go withsomeone in a car’, mitführen ‘carry’, Mitgefühl ‘compassion’, Mitglied ‘mem-ber’, mithilfe ‘with the help of’, mitkriegen ‘notice’, Mitleid ‘pity’, mitmachen‘take part’, mitreden ‘take part in a conversation’, Mitschüler ‘schoolmate’,mitspielen ‘cooperate’, mitverantwortlich ‘jointly responsible’, Mitverfasser‘co-author’, Mitwirkung ‘contribution’.

The German pattern is thus much more common than its English counterpart. Asstressed in Fleischer and Barz (2012: 84-86; 166-170) and the grammar Duden: DieGrammatik (2005: 771), compounds can contain first elements of all word classes,crucially including prepositions7. A number of nominal examples were already givenin (2). At this point, it should also be noted, however, that adverbs like durchaus ‘ab-solutely’, gegenüber ‘opposite and vorbei ‘over’ belong to this group. As far as our ana-logical account is concerned, this means that the formations Miteinander, Nebeneinanderand Durcheinander can be associated with analogical models from the group of bothnouns and adverbs.

I mentioned earlier that the diachrony of German reciprocals and their syntagmaticrelation to prepositions argues against an important role of the frequency facts illus-trated in (15). These formations are simply to old to be reducible to that factor. Thediachronic picture for English is crucially different: As already observed by Plank(2008), English has turned out to be much less “progressive” than German in terms of

7The only prepositions which seem to be excluded are bis ‘until’, für ‘for’, in ‘in’, ohne ‘without’.

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both the univerbation of the reciprocals themselves and their association with a preced-ing preposition. More specifically, if we assume that the availability of an analogicalmodel was responsible for the emergence of Prep-einander formations in German, wehave to ask for English if a similar model was possible at the appropriate point in time.The answer to this question is negative. The fact that most of the formations in (17) and(18) have long been obsolete suggests that the relevant word-formation pattern was al-ready becoming unproductive at the time when the English reciprocals each other andone another were formed, namely in late Middle English and early Modern English(for an overview see Haas 2010: 63-74). What this implies is that even though Prep-Xformations have not always been foreign to the lexical morphology of English, this pat-tern was probably not anymore available as an analogical model when each other andone another established themselves as lexicalized reciprocal pronouns. Although thesereciprocals frequently co-occurred with prepositions, there was not anymore a word-formation pattern that was strong enough to trigger the type of Prep-Recip univerbationthat took place in German.

4 English-German contrasts in word-formation: Sum-mary and outlook

In this section I will relate the seemingly isolated contrast discussed above to moregeneral tendencies in English and German word-formation. The contrastive study ofGerman and English word-formation is still in its infancy and a comprehensive picturecan only be reached when contrastive linguists will have carried out more case studies.In what follows, tendencies of English and German word-formation will be surveyedon the basis of what we have found out about the specific contrast under discussion.

4.1 ConversionThe word-formation process of conversion is generally claimed to be more productivein English than in German. A motivating factor here seems to be the competitionbetween derivation and conversion. The ubiquity of proper (as opposed to syntactic)conversion in English is explained to a large extent by the fact that derivational affixesthat were responsible for such word-class changes in earlier times have become lessproductive (for a recent study see Haselow 2011). The latter does certainly not holdfor German. Consider noun-to-verb conversion as an example. While the productivityof English noun-to-verb conversion is hardly restricted, the default strategy in Germaninvolves affixation (Lohde 2006: 280).

(21) a. Interesse ‘interest’ > interessieren ‘to interested’b. Filter ‘filter’ > filtrieren ‘to filter’c. Torpedo ‘torpedo’ > torpedieren ‘to torpedo’

As with other directions of conversion, this accounts for the word-formation type underdiscussion being so more common in English.

Nonetheless, if the observations presented in this paper tell us anything aboutEnglish-German contrasts in the domain of conversion, one finding seems to be thefollowing. Although the view commonly held in the literature according to whichconversion is more productive in English than in German remains true, syntactic con-version to nominals, i.e. the spontaneous use of a given word-form or phrase as a

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nominal expression, is productive in German. The general productivity of this processin English has not yet been investigated empirically, but on the basis of morphologicaldescriptions and exploratory corpus searches it appears that German syntax is in factmore willing to accept syntactic conversions. As was shown in (6) above, basically anykind of string can be inserted into a nominal slot like the one following demonstrativedeterminer. To be sure, this is not word-formation. There is no reason for treating Ichwill nicht ‘I don’t want to’ in (6f) as a zero-derived noun, for instance. Nonetheless,the option of using a given string as a nominal expression may be the first step to thedevelopment of a new lexeme. And this, besides the analogy process argued for inthe above sections, could be a factor that made it easier for Prep-einander phrases tobecome nouns. In combination with analogy, this reasoning could then explain theapparent paradox that we are here witnessing a “conversion” process in German, butnot in English, although we would normally expect English conversion to be more pro-ductive than German conversion. As mentioned above, further research would haveto show whether syntactic conversion is generally more restricted in English than inGerman. If this is the case, a possible reason for the higher productivity of syntacticconversion to nominals in German may be the preservation of gender distinctions inthe determiner system of German. Whereas grammatical gender has long been abol-ished in English, every German noun as well as its modifiers are (overtly or covertly)specified for one of the three gender values masculine, feminine and neuter. Syntacticconversion to nominals always takes neuter case (see the examples in [6]). As pointedout by Lühr (2003), neuter gender in Indo-European languages is generally the pre-ferred gender value in such contexts. One may speculate that the neuter gender offersa niche in which this type of conversion could establish itself more easily than it wouldbe possible in a language without gender distinctions.

But is syntactic conversion in the above sense really so clearly distinct from con-version proper? Some recent proposals seem to call this assumption into question.Lehmann (2008) offers an account of the different ways in which lexical items in dif-ferent languages are “categorial”, i.e. assigned to a specific word class. (Lehmannexamines expressions belonging the conceptual domain of experience, but his findingsseem to apply to other conceptual domains, as well.) Languages differ with respect tothe level at which categorization takes place: the root, the stem, the word form or thephrase. From this perspective, German exhibits higher degrees of root and stem cate-goriality than English (Lehmann 2008: 558-560). To put it differently, English wordsare less tied to specific part-of-speech categories than their German counterparts. Thisfinding ties in nicely with the traditional picture of conversion being more at home inEnglish than in German. The ease with which English stems can change their wordclasses may thus be reinterpreted as a low degree of categoriality. In this way, theseflexible stems can be considered as not being members of predefined word classes,but rather constituting pre-categorial stems which find their eventual role at the syn-tactic, as opposed to the morphological, level (a similar view is put forward by Bauer1983: 227).8 Although it yet remains unclear to me where exactly one should drawthe borderline between syntactic conversion and conversion proper, I see no reason forlumping them together straight-away. What keeps them apart is the following: Syntac-tic conversion to nominals, which I have claimed to be rather unrestricted in German,

8Bauer (1983) states: “The commonness of conversion can possibly be seen as breaking down the distinc-tion between form classes in English and leading to a system where there are closed sets such as pronounsand a single open set of lexical items that can be used as required. Such a move could be seen as part of thetrend away from from synthetic structure and towards analytic structure which has been fairly typical of thehistory of English over the last millenium.” (227)

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especially in combination with the neuter demonstrative dieses ‘this.N’, does not startwith pre-categorial roots or stems in Lehmann’s (2008) sense above. The input is rathera fully categorized expression (word, phrase or even sentence), which is then put into anominal slot. I reckon that the metalinguistic flavour of this operation in fact goes backto the input expressions’ being fully categorized beforehand.

4.2 CompoundingThe view of compounding taken in this paper is a product-oriented one (Bauer 2011:486 calls this ‘final form’ or Wortgebildetheit, contrasting with Wortbildung.). Thismeans that I abstracted away from the question of whether a lexicalized combinationof two bases has arisen from (i) a speaker creatively combining them to name some con-cept, or (ii) univerbation, i.e. frequent co-occurrence that has led to the lexicalizationof the collocation. My focus has rather been on the outcomes of these developments.More specifically, I asked in how far there are patterns in the language which serve asmodels for the acceptability and establishment of a new formation, irrespective of howthe syntagm has first come about. It was shown that there is one pattern that is veryclearly more productive in German than in English: Prep-X, i.e. a formation in which apreposition takes the initial position. Little contrastive work has been done on Englishcompounding. It is therefore difficult to say whether the Prep-X asymmetry standsout as a major English-German contrast. Apart from the question of whether a givenword-formation pattern is available or not, however, there can be striking contrasts inthe productivity of such patterns.

A further aspect that we observed in relation to Prep-Recip combinations is theease with which univerbation creates new lexemes in German. Importantly, this doesnot only concern the Prep-Recip formations themselves, but in turn also verbs andnouns that these formations become part of (cf. e.g. the lists in Wiemer and Nedjalkov2007: 483). It is beyond the scope of this paper to determine the degree to whichthis is a genuine aspect of German lexical morphology, or rather an artefact of (bynow partly obsolete) orthographical rules, where compound spelling was maybe lessrestricted than the actual formation of compounds. Much more contrastive work canprobably be carried out in this area of morphology, too.

5 SummaryAn attempt was made to motivate the availability of a very specific class of complexGerman nouns and their lack in English by tracing their historical development in thecontext of more general morphological contrasts between English and German. Themajor steps in the German development of Prep-einander nouns are sketched in thefollowing:

• Syntagms of prepositions and the reciprocal einander undergo univerbation. Thehigh type frequency of Prep-X compounds serves as a model on the basis ofwhich these new formations become established.

• Possibly first as instances of ‘syntactic conversion’, some of the new Prep-einandercompounds (hitherto adverbs) come to be used nominally. Since the Germanlexicon also contains nominal compounds with a preposition in initial position,some frequent Prep-einander compounds (esp. Durcheinander, Miteinander andNebeneinander) can establish themselves as new lexemes of the category noun.

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The English development differs from the aforementioned steps in crucial ways:

• Syntagms of prepositions and the reciprocals each other and one another cannotbe formed as early as their German counterparts, since the reciprocals themselvesbecome lexicalized only in the period spanning from later Middle English toearly Modern English.

• Since the lexicalization of the English reciprocals took place, there has not beenan analogical model of Prep-X compounds that was entrenched enough to triggernew formations.

• Syntactic conversion of non-lexicalized Prep-Recip sequences (e.g. with eachother) seems not to have been an alternative either. On the one hand, this partic-ular type of syntactic conversion appears to be less productive in English than inGerman. On the other hand, even if sentences like I can’t stand this “with eachother” anymore. occurred, a spontaneous nominalization of the type [with eachother]NP would not have had the chance to establish itself as a full-fledged noun,the reason being that there is no productive word-formation type [Prep-X]N thatcould serve as analogical model (again in contrast to German; see above).

This historical scenario remains speculative in so far as a detailed diachronic studyof the relevant expressions is beyond the scope of this paper. What I intended to offerhere was rather an attempt at illuminating the motivation behind a specific English-German contrast by bringing together the perspectives of contrastive linguistics, onthe one hand, and those of language-specific scholarship in the fields of English andGerman lexical morphology, on the other.

One of the merits of contrastive linguistics is that of “leading to insights unattain-able by analyzing the two languages separately.” (König and Gast 2009: 3). Thestarting point of this paper, i.e. the question of why there are no nouns of the formPrep-Recip in English, would probably never arise if one were not aware of the corre-sponding expressions in German. Whether the explanation of the contrast as it has beenproposed in the preceding section stands up to a more detailed historical investigationand the inclusion of other possibly relevant language-internal factors is left to furtherresearch.

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