Poetic and theatrical occasionalisms: Creation of new morphologically complex words by Joseph von Eichendorff, Johann Nepomuk Nestroy, Peter Handke and Arno Schmidt by Wolfgang U. Dressler, Barbara Tumfart, Dietmar Kunisch, Vanessa Hannesschläger

“…These are productivity of word formation, literary functions, main content, single use vs. reuse of them, consequences of the noun bias of German and of the preference for binary relations, size of the word families of compound constituents (especially of the first constituent), the degree of poetic licence, semantically coherent vs. incoherent combination of words within a compound, embedding into the cotext and into the situational context, gapping constructions and their make-up, preference for compounding vs. derivational morphology.The conclusion and outlook (§ 4) present proposals how literary studies may profit from investigations of poetic and theatrical occasionalisms, which represent the highest degree of language creativity of literary authors. We urge that theatre productions should highlight occasionalisms and report that Nestroy’s German occasionalisms are generally better translated into English by programs of machine translation then by human translators. …”
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