Open AccessTOOLS FOR THE EXPRESSION OF THE MEANING OF “NEGATION” IN WORD-BUILDING OF THE GERMAN LANGUAGE
Author(s) -
Irina Kruashvili
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
west-east
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2587-5434
DOI - 10.33739/2587-5434-2020-3-11-18
Subject(s) - prefix , linguistics , negation , german , computer science , natural language processing , word formation , adjective , artificial intelligence , noun , philosophy
The aim of the article is to describe, what word building tools express negation in modern German language; to determine the place and importance of word-forming elements expressing negation in the German word building system; to characterize the internal structure and semantics of formations expressing negation; to describe the inventory of prefix derivatives expressing negation, to classify them according to formal and semantic parameters. The article uses several methods of research. Namely, analysis of direct constituents, methods of descriptive, comparative, substantial and disjunctive opposition. The use of mentioned methods make the formal and semantic structure of word building constructions transparent. Results of the research can be described as follows: the article analyzes more than one hundred word building constructions expressing negation, fetched from lexicographical sources, journals and newspapers, fiction literature and other samples of the functional style. The article reviews the inventory of prefix derivatives having negative word building meanings, there are described their structural and semantic characteristics. The corpus of formations expressing negation is compared to the headwords of dictionaries of the German language and there are revealed the items that are not registered in dictionaries. We can make a conclusion from the materials analyzed in the article that prefixes represent very productive word building tools to express negation in the German language. The nominative function of prefix derivatives that express negation is to modify already existing words. They almost do not participate in compression of syntax constructions. During prefixation there occurs determination of the substantive or adjective root form by a morpheme prefix. Foreign (borrowed) prefixes expressing negation are mainly used in scientific special field texts, which is quite opposite for the German prefixes that mainly occur in the vocabulary of everyday conversation.