Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2026 / Constraints on Linking Element Choice in German Nominal Compounding: A Large-Scale Corpus Study

Constraints on Linking Element Choice in German Nominal Compounding: A Large-Scale Corpus Study

Paper · 2026 · Maksim Shmalts

Summary

German noun–noun compounds often insert a linking element between their constituents, as in Bücherregal. Which linker appears is hard to predict. Instead of firm rules, the literature describes many soft constraints, mostly tied to properties of the first constituent. These constraints are well documented in theory but had never been tested systematically on a large corpus. This paper fills that gap. The author gathers and classifies 64 constraints from earlier studies and evaluates as many as possible on a modified version of the compound dataset of Schäfer and Pankratz (2018), which contains 280k+ N+N compounds. Linguistic properties are retrieved automatically from the CELEX2 lexical database. Each constraint is scored for coverage (the share of compounds that meet its conditions) and regularity (the share of covered compounds that actually follow it). Most claims from the literature hold up. Several turn out to be stronger or weaker than their original wording implies, and the author proposes revised formulations. The resulting constraint space serves descriptive German morphology. It could also act as a knowledge base for generating compounds with LLMs and for evaluating their linguistic abilities.

Key points

  • Of the 64 linker constraints taken from the literature, 39 received corpus statistics. Semantic and lexical constraints were left out of the empirical analysis.
  • The data are a modified version of the Schäfer and Pankratz (2018) compound dataset (280k+ N+N compounds), with morphological and phonological features drawn from CELEX2.
  • Linkers studied include -∅-, -s-, -es-, -(e)n-, -e-, -"e-, -(")er-, -"-, and -(e)ns-. Rare loanword-specific linkers and linkers that delete stem segments were excluded.
  • Some constraints are weaker than stated in the literature. For example, constraint (31) on polysyllabic feminine nouns ending in [t] has a regularity of only 0.505, so the author downgrades its wording from "often" to "sometimes". Constraints (40) and (41), on the likelihood of -s- rising with morphological and phonological complexity, reach 0.735 and 0.723 and are recast as tendencies.
  • Other constraints prove more regular than described, and some needed refined conditions (e.g., allowing derived nouns with a stressed prefix). The study also stresses that structured linguistic data is essential for large-scale empirical work of this kind.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of TübingenTübingen · Germany75 works · 41,081 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works

Cite

Cite as Maksim Shmalts. 2026. Constraints on Linking Element Choice in German Nominal Compounding: A Large-Scale Corpus Study. Proceedings of the Workshop on Structured Linguistic Data and Evaluation (SLiDE).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/24uhjb79y8ov

@inproceedings{shmalts2026constraints,
  title = {{Constraints on Linking Element Choice in German Nominal Compounding: A Large-Scale Corpus Study}},
  author = {Maksim Shmalts},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Structured Linguistic Data and Evaluation (SLiDE)},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/24uhjb79y8ov},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/24uhjb79y8ov}
}

References

25 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Gerhard Augst. 1975. Untersuchungen zum Morpheminventar der deutschen Gegenwartssprache. Narr, Tübingen. find
  2. Marco Baroni, Johannes Matiasek, and Harald Trost. 2002. Wordform- and Class-based Prediction of the Components of German Nominal Compounds in an AAC System. In COLING 2002: The 19th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. find
  3. Peter Eisenberg. 2013. Grundriss der deutschen Grammatik, 4 edition. J.B. Metzler Stuttgart, Stuttgart. EBook published 27 August 2016. find
  4. Nanna Fuhrhop and Sebastian Kürschner. 2015. 32. Linking elements in Germanic, pages 568– 582. De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, München, Boston. find
  5. Maria Koliopoulou. 2014. How close to syntax are compounds? Evidence from the linking element in German and Modern Greek compounds. Rivista di Linguistica, 26(2):51–70. find
  6. Kristin Kopf. 2017. Fugenelement und Bindestrich in der Compositions-Fuge, pages 177–204. De Gruyter, Berlin, Boston. find
  7. Andrea Krott, Gary Libben, Gonia Jarema, Wolfgang Dressler, Robert Schreuder, and Harald Baayen. 2004. Probability in the Grammar of German and Dutch: Interfixation in Triconstituent Compounds. Language and Speech, 47(1):83– 106. PMID: 15298331. ↗
  8. Andrea Krott, Robert Schreuder, R. Harald Baayen, and Wolfgang U. Dressler. 2007. Analogical effects on linking elements in German compound words. Language and Cognitive Processes, 22(1):25–57. Sebastian Kürschner. Verfugung-s-nutzung kontrastiv. Zur Funktion der Fugenelemente im Deutschen und Dänischen. Tijdschrift voor Skan-dinavistiek, 26(2). ↗
  9. Sebastian Kürschner. 2010. Fuge-n-kitt, voeg-en-mes, fuge-masse und fog-e-ord - Fugenelemente im Deutschen, Niederländischen, Schwedischen und Dänischen : ein Grenzfall der Morphologie im Sprachkontrast. (Linking elements in German, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish contrast). In Dammel, Antje; Kürschner, Sebastian; Nübling, Damaris (Hrsg.): Kontrastive Germanistische Linguistik, volume 206-209 of Germanistische Linguistik, pages 827–862. Olms, Hildesheim. find
  10. Gary Libben, Monika Boniecki, Marlies Martha, Karin Mittermann, Katharina Korecky-Kröll, and Wolfgang U. Dressler. 2009. Interfixation in German compounds: What factors govern acceptability judgements? Rivista di Linguistica, 21(1):149–180. find
  11. Martin Neef and Susanne R. Borgwaldt. 2012. Fugenelemente in neugebildeten Nominalkomposita, pages 27–56. De Gruyter, Berlin, Boston. find
  12. Damaris Nübling and Renata Szczepaniak. 2008. On the way from morphology to phonology: German linking elements and the role of the phonological word. Morphology, 18(1):1–25. ↗
  13. Damaris Nübling and Renata Szczepaniak. 2013. Linking elements in German Origin, Change, Functionalization. Morphology, 23(1):67–89. ↗
  14. Lorelies Ortner and Elgin Müller-Bollhagen. 1991. Hauptteil 4 Substantivkomposita. De Gruyter, Berlin, Boston. find
  15. Roland Schäfer. 2018. Einführung in die grammatische Beschreibung des Deutschen. Number 2 in Textbooks in Language Sciences. Language Science Press, Berlin. ↗
  16. Roland Schäfer and Elizabeth Pankratz. 2018. The plural interpretability of German linking elements. Morphology, 28(4):325–358. ↗
  17. Carmen Scherer. 2012. Vom Reisezentrum zum Reise Zentrum. Variation in der Schreibung von N+N-Komposita, pages 57–82. De Gruyter, Berlin, Boston. find
  18. Barbara Schlücker. 2023. Compounding and Linking Elements in Germanic. ↗
  19. Barbara Schlücker. 2012. Die deutsche Kom-positionsfreudigkeit. Übersicht und Einführung, pages 1–26. De Gruyter, Berlin, Boston. find
  20. Helmut Schmid, Arne Fitschen, and Ulrich Heid. 2004. SMOR: A German Computational Morphology Covering Derivation, Composition, and Inflection. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’04), Lisbon, Portugal. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
  21. Heide Wegener. 2003. Entstehung und Funktion der Fugenelemente im Deutschen, oder: warum wir keine Autosbahn haben. Linguistische Berichte, 196:425–457. find
  22. Heide Wegener. 2005. Das Hühnerei vor der Hun-dehütte : von der Notwendigkeit historischen Wissens in der Grammatikographie des Deutschen. 10. find
  23. Language Resource References Baayen, R. H. and Piepenbrock, R. and Gulikers, L. 1995. CELEX2. Linguistic Data Consortium, ISLRN 204-698-863-053-1. Web Download. find
  24. IDS. 2026. Deutsches Referenzkorpus / Archiv der Korpora geschriebener Gegenwartssprache 2026-I. Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache. PID https://www.ids-mannheim.de/dereko. Release vom 19.01.2026. ↗
  25. Schäfer, Roland and Pankratz, Elizabeth. 2018. Dataset: The plural interpretability of German linking elements ("Morphology"). Zenodo. PID https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1323211. ↗

Updated

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/shmalts-2026-constraints-linking-element-choice-german/