German nouns instrumenti on -er as an example of word formation convergences and divergences between German and Czech. Cover Image

Deutsche Nomina Instrumenti auf -er als Beispiel für Wortbildungskonvergenzen und -divergenzen zwischen dem Deutschen und Tschechischen
German nouns instrumenti on -er as an example of word formation convergences and divergences between German and Czech.

Author(s): Sarah Dobiášová, Tomáš Káňa
Subject(s): Applied Linguistics
Published by: Univerzita Karlova v Praze - Filozofická fakulta, Vydavatelství
Keywords: contrastive word-formation; corpus analysis; InterCorp; nomina agentis; nomina instrumenti

Summary/Abstract: The aim of the article is to examine the most frequent nomina instrumenti (NI) ending in -er in German and their Czech equivalents, in order to reveal similarities and differences in the ways NI are formed in both languages. To present a representative and realistic picture of the German-Czech interlingual relations, authentic language material extracted from the parallel language corpus InterCorp was used in the analysis. First, the most frequent NI ending in -er were separated from other homonymous denominations, and then the study focused on their Czech counterparts. The results show that most equivalents of German masculine NI ending in -er are also derivatives in Czech, but the dispersion goes across all three genders. It was concluded that the Czech equivalents of the German nomina instrumenti ending in -er are very often derived by means of various suffixes, with the most frequent being the suffixes -č- for masculine nouns, -(č)ka for feminine nouns and -tko for neuter nouns. Additionally, the article shows that similarities and differences between the two languages in this field can also be traced back to the morphological type of the two languages.

  • Issue Year: 33/2023
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 45-67
  • Page Count: 23
  • Language: German