Abstract

The paper aims to account for the semantic properties of eventive personal name compounds in German (e.g. Brezel-Bush/Pretzel-Bush). These are compounds where the compound constituents are combined based on the discursive event in which the name bearer has participated. In this regard, the question arises of how the relationship between the compound constituents can be modelled given that the knowledge about the discursive event plays a central role. Starting from the corpus data collected from the German Reference Corpus (DeReKo), the Digital Dictionary of the German Language (DWDS) and Twitter (X), we test the hypothesis that the relationships between the constituents of eventive personal name compounds cannot be captured by existing approaches to the semantics of compounds. Instead we apply two frame semantics approaches to this compound type: an approach based on the German FrameNet and an approach based on Barsalou frames and show how they contribute to the linguistic operationalization of discursive events that underlie the relationship between the constituents. The analysis indicates that well-known advantages and disadvantages of both frame semantic approaches also apply to the eventive personal name compounds. Whereas the limited set of frame elements from the German FrameNet in combination with construction morphology can account for the non-compositional compound meaning, Barsalou-Frames are recursive and therefore provide better evidence for different aspects of knowledge involved in the interpretation of eventive personal name compounds.