Dataset: The plural interpretability of German linking elements ("Morphology")

<p><strong>This dataset accompanies a paper to be published in &quot;Morphology&quot; (JOMO, Springer).&nbsp;Under the present DOI, all data generated for this research as well as all&nbsp;scripts used are stored. The paper itself is not CC-licensed, refer to Springer&#39;s &quot;Morphology&quot; website for details!</strong></p> <p><strong>Abstract</strong></p> <p>In this paper, we take a closer theoretical and empirical look at the linking elements in German N1+N2 compounds which are identical to the plural marker of N1 (such as <em>-er</em>&nbsp;with umlaut, as in <em>H&auml;us-er-meer</em>&nbsp;&#39;sea of houses&#39;).&nbsp;Various perspectives on the actual extent of plural interpretability of these pluralic linking elements are expressed in the literature.&nbsp;We aim to clarify this question by empirically examining to what extent there may be a relationship between plural form and meaning which informs in which sorts of compounds pluralic linking elements appear.&nbsp;Specifically, we investigate whether pluralic linking elements occur especially frequently in compounds where a plural meaning of the first constituent is induced either externally (through plural inflection of the entire compound) or internally (through a relation between the constituents such that N2 forces N1 to be conceptually plural, as in the example above).&nbsp;The results of a corpus study using the DECOW16A corpus and a split-100 experiment show that in the internal but not external plural meaning conditions, a pluralic linking element is preferred over a non-pluralic one, though there is considerable inter-speaker variability, and limitations imposed by other constraints on linking element distribution also play a role.&nbsp;However, we show the overall tendency that German language users do use pluralic linking elements as cues to the plural interpretation of N1+N2 compounds.&nbsp;Our interpretation does not reference a specific morphological framework.&nbsp;Instead, we view our data as strengthening the general approach of probabilistic morphology.</p>