Eine Heuristik zur Erkennung von N+N-Komposita im Frühneuhochdeutschen

Early New High German N+N compounds are notoriously difficult to identify. This is mostly due to formally similar or identical pronominal genitive constructions. Furthermore, what looks like a noun at first glance might sometimes be an affixoid, an adjective or a verb stem. The precise identification of compounds is not only relevant for researchers concerned with word-formation. It has consequences for corpus lemmatisation, lexicography and our understanding of the noun phrase, to name just a few areas. Compound identification has been tackled before (mostly by Pavlov [1983] and NITTA [1987]), but modern corpus linguistics allows for a better assessment of all factors involved. This paper reevaluates and outlines strategies to identify Early New High German compounds, aiming to serve as an easily adaptable guideline for future research.