Morphological Productivity in German Texts by Non-Native Authors. A Corpus Linguistic Analysis

This study compares the productivity of word formation patterns involving the affixes -ung, -keit/-igkeit/-heit, -bar and ver-. The comparison is between non-native and native German writers, using the Chamisso corpus and a comparable corpus. The creative use of the German language in non-native literature, a literature of migrant authors who write in German as a foreign language, is widely considered the most prominent feature of this writing. According to critics, this creative use of language is related to the fact that authors switch from the native language to German. Such an assumption is plausible from a linguistic standpoint: empirical studies in language acquisition and in sociolinguistics support the hypothesis that linguistic creativity could consist of an over-use of productive morphological categories. My results reject the hypothesis that the non-native authors differ from German authors in the productivity of the observed morphological categories. This negative result points out that the non-native authors have achieved near-native competence in the use of word formation patterns.