Keywords
Morphopragmatics
morphonotactics
language acquisition
How to Cite
Abstract
This paper argues for the theoretical and explanatory superiority of Natural Linguistics (NatLing) over other linguistic models, presenting four ascending levels of evidence. The first level examines successful analyses of specific topics such as poetic occasionalisms, diminutives, and plural formation. The second level highlights innovative phenomena uniquely developed within NatLing, including phonotactics, morphosemantic transparency, and pragmatic variation in diminutives. The third level introduces novel subdisciplines—morphonotactics and morphopragmatics—demonstrating their wide empirical and theoretical impact across languages and acquisition studies. The highest level presents phenomena explainable only within NatLing, notably children’s strong blind-alley developments in morphology and syntax, which defy both generative and usage-based accounts. By integrating principles of iconicity, pragmatics, and self-organization, the paper concludes that Natural Linguistics provides the most comprehensive, cognitively grounded, and empirically productive framework for understanding linguistic structure, change, and acquisition.
References
Biscetti, Stefania & Wolfgang U. Dressler. 2002. Funzioni testuali degli alterativi [Textual functions of altratives]. In R. Bauer & H. Goebl (eds.), Parallela 9. Wil-helmsfeld: Egert. 53–68.
Čamber, Marina & Wolfgang U. Dressler. 2023. Simultan-bilingualer Pluralerwerb von Deutsch und Kroatisch. Zagreber Germanistische Studien 31. 5–30.
Chanpira, Erik I. 1966. Ob okkazional’nom slove i okkazional’nom slovoobrazovanii [On occasional word and occasional word formation]. In E.A. Zemskaja & D.N. Šmelev (eds.), Razvitie slovoobrazovanija sovremennogo russkogo jazyka. Mos-kva: Nauka. 153–166.
Dressler, Wolfgang U. 1981. General principles of poetic license in word formation. In H. Weydt (ed.), Logos semantikos: Studia linguistica in honorem Eugenio Coser-iu. Berlin: de Gruyter / Madrid: Gredos. 423–431.
Dressler, Wolfgang U. 1982. Aspects of text typology and attribution. In S. Allén (ed.), Text Processing. Proceedings of the Nobel Symposium 51. Stockholm: Almqvist. 637–647.
Dressler, Wolfgang U. 2023. Zum Stand der Forschungen in der Natürlichen Linguis-tik am Beispiel der Natürlichen Morphologie. In J. Brunner, P. Hödl, V. Mattes & T. Schwaiger (eds.), Grazer Linguistische Studien 94. 87–120.
Dressler, Wolfgang U. & Ursula Doleschal. 1991. La presenza italiana nella linguistica internazionale. Un’indagine esplorativa. La linguistica italiana oggi, Società di Linguistica Italiana 21. Roma: Bulzoni. 67–86.
Dressler, Wolfgang U., Vanessa Hannesschläger, Dietmar Kunisch, Elisa Mattiello & Barbara Tumfart. 2023. A comparison of occasionalistic compounds of Joseph von Eichendorff, Johann Nepomuk Nestroy, Peter Handke and James Joyce. Submitted to LiLi.
Dressler, Wolfgang U., Basilio Calderone, Sabine Sommer-Lolei & Katharina Ko-recky-Kröll (eds.). 2021. Experimental, acquisitional and corpus linguistic ap-proaches to the study of morphonotactics. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press.
Dressler, Wolfgang U. & Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk. 2006. Proposing mor-phonotactics. Italian Journal of Linguistics 18. 249–266.
Dressler, Wolfgang U., Miroslava Hliničanová, Matej Ďurčo, Karlheinz Mörth, Katharina Korecky-Kröll. 2015. Phonotactic vs. morphonotactic obstruent clusters in Slovak and German. Italian Journal of Linguistics 27. 45–60.
Dressler, Wolfgang U. & Ferenc Kiefer. 1990. Austro-Hungarian morphopragmatics. In W.U. Dressler et al. (eds.), Contemporary morphology. Berlin: de Gruyter. 69–77.
Dressler, Wolfgang U. & Alona Kononenko 2020. Main differences between German and Russian (mor)phonotactics: a corpus-based study. In A. Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak, M. Wrembel & P. Gąsiorowski (eds.), Approaches to the study of sound structure and speech. Interdisciplinary work in honour of Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk. New York: Routledge. 145–158.
Dressler, Wolfgang U., Alona Kononenko, Sabine Sommer-Lolei, Katharina Korecky-Kröll, Paulina Zydorowicz & Laura Kamandulytė-Merfeldienė. 2019. Morpholog-ical richness, transparency and the evolution of morphonotactic patterns. Folia Linguistica 53.
Dressler, Wolfgang U., Veronika Mattes & Laila Kjӕrbӕk. 2021. Introduction. In: V. Mattes, S. Sommer-Lolei, K. Korecky-Kröll & W.U. Dressler (eds.), Acquisition of derivation. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 1–19.
Dressler, Wolfgang U., Elisa Mattiello & Veronika Ritt-Benmimoun. 2023. Morpho-logical richness, diminutives, and priority of morphopragmatics over mor-phosemantics: With data from Arabic, English, German, and Italian. In S. Mano-va, K. Korecky-Kröll & L. Grestenberger (eds.), Dissecting morphological theory: Diminutivization. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Dressler, Wolfgang U. & Lavinia Merlini Barbaresi 1987. Elements of morphoprag-matics. L.A.U.D. 1987. 1–29
Dressler, Wolfgang U. & Lavinia Merlini Barbaresi 1991a. Elements of morphoprag-matics. In J. Verschueren (ed.), Levels of linguistic adaptation. Amsterdam: Ben-jamins. 33–51.
Dressler, Wolfgang U. & Lavinia Merlini Barbaresi. 1991b. Interradical interfixes: contact and contrast. In V. Ivir & D. Kalogjera (eds.), Languages in contact and contrast. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 133–145.
Dressler, Wolfgang U. & Lavinia Merlini Barbaresi. 1994. Morphopragmatics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Dressler, Wolfgang U. & Lavinia Merlini Barbaresi. 2010. Why is a violon-c-ello big-ger than a viola. In R. de Cillia, H. Gruber & M. Krzyżanowski (eds.), Politik Diskurs Identität. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag. 45–50.
Dressler, Wolfgang U., Lavinia Merlini Barbaresi, Sonja Schwaiger, Jutta Ransmayr, Sabine Sommer-Lolei & Katharina Korecky-Kröll. 2019. Rivalry and lack of blocking among italian and German diminutives in adult and child language. In F. Rainer, F. Gardani, W.U. Dressler & H.C. Luschützky (eds.), Competition in in-flection and word-formation. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland. 123–143.
Dressler, Wolfgang U. & Karlheinz Mörth. 2012. Vom Einfluss der Pragmatik auf die Grammatik, insbesondere in der Entwicklung der Pluralbildung. Eine corpus-basierte Untersuchung. In P. Ernst (ed.), Historische Pragmatik. Jahrbuch für Germanistische Sprachgeschichte 3. 75–93.
Dressler, Wolfgang U., Sonja Schwaiger & Jutta Ransmayr 2020. The role of word-formation families and subfamilies in the organisation of German diminutive compounds. In L. Körtvelyessy, S. Valera & P. Stekauer (eds.), Complex words: Advances in morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 293–310.
Dressler, Wolfgang U., Miroslava Hliničanová, Matej Ďurčo, Karlheinz Mörth & Katharina Korecky-Kröll. 2015. Phonotactic vs. morphonotactic obstruent clus-ters in Slovak and German. Italian Journal of Linguistics 27. 45–60.
Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, Katarzyna. 2014. Explaining phonotactics using NAD. Lan-guage Sciences 46. 6–17.
Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, Katarzyna. 2015. Are frequent, early and easy clusters also unmarked? Italian Journal of Linguistics 27(1). 29–44.
Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, Katarzyna, Paulina Zydorowicz and Michał Jankowski. 2013. English morphonotactics: A corpus study. The Phonetician. A Publication of In-ternational Society of Phonetic Sciences 107–108. 53–67.
Hliničanová, Miroslava, Matej Ďurčo, Karlheinz Mörth & Wolfgang U. Dressler. 2017. Phonotaktische versus morphonotaktische Konsonantengruppen im Slowakischen und Deutschen: Eine kontrastive korpuslinguistische Untersuchung. In: C. Resch & W.U. Dressler (eds.), Digitale Methoden der Korpusforschung in Österreich. Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. 159–177.
Kelić, Maja & Wolfgang U. Dressler 2019. The development of morphonotactic and phonotactic word-initial consonant clusters in Croatian first-language acquisition. Suvremena Lingvistika 45. 179–200.
Korecky-Kröll, Katharina & Wolfgang U. Dressler. 2022. Expressive German adjec-tive compounds in hate speech. In N. Knoblock (ed.), Grammar of hate: Morpho-syntactic features of hateful, aggressive, and dehumanizing discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 197–221.
Korecky-Kröll, Katharina, Gary Libben, Nicole Stempfer, Julia Wiesinger, Eva Rei-nisch, Johannes Bertl & Wolfgang U. Dressler. 2012. Helping a crocodile to learn German plurals: children’s online judgment of actual, potential and illegal plural forms. Morphology 22. 35–65.
Korecky-Kröll, Katharina, Sabine Sommer-Lolei & Wolfgang U. Dressler. 2017. Emergence and early development of German compounds in Dressler. In W.U. Dressler, F.N. Ketrez & M. Kilani-Schoch (eds.), Nominal compound acquisition. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 19–37.
Laaha, Sabine & Wolfgang U. Dressler 2012. Suffix predictability and stem transpar-ency in the acquisition of German noun plurals. In F. Kiefer, M. Ladányi & P. Siptár (eds.), Current Issues in Morphological Theory. (Ir)regularity, analogy and frequency. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 217–235.
Laaha, Sabine, Laila Kjaerbaek, Hans Basbøll & Wolfgang U. Dressler. 2011. The impact of sound structure on morphology: An experimental study on children’s acquisition of German and Danish noun plurals focusing on stem change. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 43. 106–126
MacWhinney, Brian. 2000. The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Mattiello, Elisa & Wolfgang U. Dressler 2019. The morphosemantic transparen-cy/opacity of novel English analogical compounds and compound families. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 53. 67–114.
Mattiello, Elisa & Wolfgang U. Dressler. 2022. Dualism and superposition in the anal-ysis of English synthetic compounds ending in -er. Linguistics Online 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2021-0235.
Merlini Barbaresi, Lavinia & Wolfgang U. Dressler. 2020. Pragmatic explanations in morphology. In V. Pirrelli, I. Plag & W.U. Dressler (eds.), Word knowledge and word usage: A cross-disciplinary guide to the mental lexicon. Berlin: de Gruyter, 405–451.
Ransmayr, Jutta, Sonja Schwaiger & Wolfgang U. Dressler. 2022. Semantische Unter-suchungen zu österreichischen Diminutiven und Diminutivkomposita. Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik 89. 82–98.
Mörth, Karlheinz & Wolfgang U. Dressler. 2014. German plural doublets with and without meaning differentiation. In F. Rainer, W.U. Dressler, F. Gardani & H.C. Luschützky (eds.), Morphology and meaning. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 249–258.
Ransmayr, Jutta, Sonja Schwaiger, Matej Durco, Hannes Pirker & Wolfgang U. Dress-ler. 2016. Graduierung der Transparenz von Diminutiven auf -chen: Eine kor-puslinguistische Untersuchung. Deutsche Sprache 44. 261–286.
Ritt, Nikolaus. 2009. Exploring Middle English (mor-)phonotactics: the case of word final /nd/. Selim 16. 65–89.
Ronneberger-Sibold, Elke. 1996. Preferred sound shapes of new roots: on some pho-notactic and prosodic properties of shortenings in German and French. In B. Hurch & R. Rhodes (eds.), Natural Phonology: The state of the art. Berlin: Mou-ton de Gruyter. 261–292.
Ronneberger-Sibold, Elke. 2015. Word-creation. In P.O. Müller, I. Ohnheiser, S. Ol-sen & F. Rainer (eds.), Word-formation. An international handbook of the lan-guages of Europe. Vol. 1. Berlin: De Gruyter. 485–500.
Ronneberger. Elke & Wolfgang U. Dressler. 2023. Extragrammatical, marginal mor-phology and poetic creativity. In K. Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, P. Donegan & W.U. Dressler (eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Natural Linguistics. Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press. Submitted and accepted.
Schrödl, Christina, Katharina Korecky-Kröll & Wolfgang U. Dressler. 2015. Plural-morphologie im österreichischen Deutsch: Dialekt und Erstspracherwerb. In A.N. Lenz, T. Ahlers & M.M. Glauninger (eds.), Dimensionen des Deutschen in Öster-reich. Variation und Varietäten im sozialen Kontext. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. 165–188.
Schwaiger, Sonja, Adrien Barbaresi, Katharina Korecky-Kröll, Jutta Ransmayr & Wolfgang Dressler. 2019. Diminutivvariation in österreichischen elektronischen Corpora. In L. Bülow, A.K. Fischer & K. Herbert (eds.), Dimensionen des spra-chlchen Raums: Variation – Mehrsprachigkeit – Konzeptualisierung. Wien: Peter Lang, 14–162.
Schwaiger, S., J. Ransmayr, K. Korecky-Kröll, S. Sommer-Lolei & W. Dressler 2017. Scaling morphosemantic transparency/opacity. A corpus-linguistic and acquisition-ist study of German diminutives. Yearbook of the Poznań Linguistics Meeting 3. 141–153.
Soeffner, Hans-Georg & Ronald Hitzler. 1994. Hermeneutik als Haltung und Hand-lung, in N. Schröer (ed.), Interpretative Sozialforschung. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 28–55.
Spina, Rossella & Wolfgang U. Dressler. 2011. How far can diachronic change be predicted: the case of Italo-Romance first person plural present indicative. Dia-chronica 28. 499–544.
Werner, Martina, Wolfgang U. Dressler & Karlheinz Mörth. 2017. Pluraldubletten diachron und synchron: Eine korpusbasierte Untersuchung zu den Spuren der Di-achronie im Gegenwartsdeutschen. In C. Resch & W.U. Dressler (eds.), Digitale Methoden der Korpusforschung in Österreich. Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. 139–157.
Zydorowicz, Paulina. 2019. Polish (mor)phonotactics in first language acquisition, connected speech and cluster processing. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM.
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Wolfgang U. Dressler
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
All papers published by the Yearbook of the Poznań Linguistic Meeting are published in an Open Access model using the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 Creative Commons licence.