The notion of “Eigentlichkeit” (‘authenticity’), when approached from a perspective of language philosophy, is associated with the quality of linguistic entities of referring to things in the world in a truthful and a maximally transparent way, cf. Gardt (1995). Obviously, there are numerous expressions that do not seem to conduct themselves accordingly and display a rather “non-authentic”, i.e., non-transparent behavior instead, like indirect and ironic speech acts or idiomatic expressions like Cat got your tongue? ...

The implementation of argument-structural effects on word-formation is a vital aspect in modeling the lexical system and the interface between morphology and syntax. The current article provides an overview of theoretical perspectives in the field and presents analyses of structural principles holding in the domain. A number of test cases relating to fundamental operations, e.g., in compounding and nominalization are discussed, as well as specific conditions restricting the formation of morphologically complex words.

The current paper investigates German verb-noun compounds like Parkticket (‘park ticket’) and examines the structural and semantic visibility of the verbal modifier and, in particular, its situation variable. The latter will be analyzed as generically bound while pronominal access to this variable will be explained with the permeability of the Principle of Lexical Integrity. Several test criteria, like argument saturation and PRO control, lead to the assumption of a phrasal projection below the word level, which is ...