Neue Wege in der Analyse der historischen Wortbildung des Deutschen

This paper outlines the long-term project ‘Wortfamilien diachron’ (= Word Families in Diachrony; WoDia), funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and executed at the Universities of Frankfurt/M., Hamburg, Kiel, and Trier. Its primary goal is the development of an online database-driven research environment for the historical word formation of German, and it is intended for implementation in both research and teaching. The dataset comprises lemmas from the Old High German, Middle High German, Old Saxon and Middle Low German dictionaries. WoDia integrates these lemmas into an overarching word family structure by putting each word in its position within its word family. The individual word formation elements and the word formation hierarchy are mapped in a structural formula. The four vocabularies are interconnected and linked to the online dictionary resources and to the reference corpora of historical German. This approach used in the research environment WoDia enables the user to analyse processes of change within the historical vocabularies of German, particularly transformations in word family structures and the usage of word formation elements. The methodical approach employed in constructing the database is presented in this paper, and concrete possibilities of application are illustrated by means of three exemplary case studies.