Abstract

This study examines the morphological behavior of new German verbal Anglicisms by exploring the frequencies of non-finite verbal forms in a large and novel German-language social media corpus. In order to identify new Anglicisms, a list of potential words was created by building German word forms from English verbal stems and excluding words that exist in the standard German lexicon. Then, the frequencies of the new non-finite verbal forms were tabulated, including prefixed verbal forms. Although new German verbal Anglicisms are infrequent, many types are attested, some of which exhibit inflectional variation. The data suggest that assimilation of the past participle to German orthographical norms is influenced by phonological and phonotactic, semantic, and stylistic/pragmatic considerations, and is mediated by frequency effects. In addition, the derivational morpheme -ier- is shown to be only somewhat productive. By considering frequency patterns of verbal Anglicisms in an online medium in which multilingualism and non-standard language are prevalent, the analysis provides a snapshot of the process by which the verbal lexicon of German is undergoing change.