Uni und Studis: die besten Wörter des Deutschen

The present paper offers an analysis of the German i-formations in an optimality-theoretic framework. The i-formations are predominantly hypochoristics and are highly productive. It is proposed that -i is a derivational suffix that imposes a restrictive prosodic structure to the stem it attaches to. The result of the derivation must be a syllabic trochee. It is also shown that syllabic trochees are the unmarked feet of German. The Correspondence Theory of McCarthy & Prince (1995) is very appropriate to account for these observations. At the end of the paper, it is shown that other languages - here French and Japanese - use their own unmarked feet to form hypochoristics and words in secret languages