Bandwurmkomposita als besonderes Phänomen des Deutschen

Every language is characterized by numerous phenomena which deserve particular attention. Among such phenomena in the German language, one should undoubtedly mention multi-part word compounds, which in this article are also referred to as multiple complex compounds, tapeworm compounds or tapeworm words. Various questions related to this German language phenomenon made it possible to establish the linguistic and extra-linguistic factors responsible for creating those long and extremely long compounds, the areas in which they are created, their length (depending on the number of letters), their position in the classifi cation of speech parts and their forms. In order to arrive at research conclusions in the present article, I have used the COSMAS II corpus. Examples of multi-part compounds come from FOCUS magazine articles published between January 2000 and June 2014.