Making sense of nonce words
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Abstract: The project „Wortwarte“ (www.wortwarte.de) aims at the collection and documentation of new words in German. The collection is based on German newspaper texts and enables lexicologists and lexicographers to describe lexical aspects of language change. One of the shortcomings of the approach is that only words can be detected on the basis of their form. New meanings of existing words are this invisible. In this paper it will be argued that a retrospective analysis of the collected data, in particular of the huge number of German compounds, allows insights into meaning changes of the parts of these compounds, in particular of the morphological head of such constructions. I will illustrate this point with three examples. The paper ends with some perspectives on the potential to automate parts of these analyses.