Andreas Nolda

Research

My research in theoretical and German linguistics focuses on morphology, syntax, and semantics.

Over the last years, I developed a general theory of word formation, dubbed Patterns-and-Restrictions Theory (PR), and applied it to word-formation phenomena mainly from German.

According to PR, the word-formation component of a linguistic system provides pairings of word-formation patterns and related base restrictions. Those pairings may be one-to-many: one word-formation pattern can be paired with more than one base restriction. Sets of word-formation patterns determine the productive or unproductive word-formation processes in the system. Ultimately, word-formation processes, word-formation patterns, and base restrictions serve to establish the word-formation relations between (lexicalised or non-lexicalised) lexical units in the system. Roughly speaking, a word-formation relation holds if, and only if, a word-formation process in the system can built some or all of the product forms by means of a word-formation pattern from base forms conforming to a matching base restriction.

For the formal modelling of linguistic objects and their semantic interpretation, PR presupposes the theoretical framework of Integrational Linguistics (IL). IL takes a Word-and-Paradigm approach to lexical units, which can not only model morphologically, but also syntactically, complex words.

Parts of PR’s application to German have been implemented in a computer program called “wf“. Please contact me in case you are interested in trying it out.

My further research interests include:

• the structure and formation of numeral systems;
• the syntax and semantics of adpositions and derived words;
• the theoretical reconstruction of morphological and syntactic constructions;
• the methodology of acceptability judgement elicitation.