What Makes a Word Dissociated? A Contrastive Study of the English and German Vocabulary

According to Leisi (1955), the English vocabulary is dissociated – in contrast to the German word stock. By this, Leisi understands that English words are less integrated into word families than German lexical items. However, even though this idea is commonly taught in English linguistics at German universities, there have not yet been any empirical tests. The paper therefore presents a recent study based on the 2,500 most frequent lemmas from the British National Corpus and the German DWDS Core Corpus. The lexical items were decomposed into both formally and semantically related constituents, and morpho-semantically related complex words containing the list items were sought for in electronic dictionaries and corpora of varying sizes. In addition, variables such as etymological origin, frequency and part of speech were taken into account – in order to determine which factors ultimately result in a word’s dissociation. Leisi, Ernst (1955): Das heutige Englisch: Wesenszüge und Probleme. Heidelberg: Winter