Semantic non-transparency in the mental lexicon

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? Not unexpectedly, though, such expressions – despite their apparent lack of transparency – have merits in their own right. These can often be explained on grounds of Grice’s conversational maxims, see Grice (1975). For example, indirect speech acts, as is known, come to the benefit of adhering to the politeness maxim and a certain metaphorical characteristic is added in the denotation of idiomatic expressions. So, we can hypothesize a systematic correlation to be functioning between authenticity, on the one hand, and expressivity, on the other. In the current paper, the interplay between these two factors is investigated in the domain of word-formation. In particular, I will focus on aspects of semantic compositionality and the supposed naming function of novel compounds and how these factors relate to the perceived novelty or “markedness” of novel compounds. For the analysis, we will concentrate on novel adjective-noun compounds (Blauschachtel ‘blue_box’, Schmalmesser ‘slim_knife’ etc.) with occasional glances at noun-noun compounds where relevant.