Biography:
I am a second-year student studying Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State, and I am planning on specializing in design and development. I am from State College and enjoy going to Penn State. I have always been very interested in research and the research process, and am excited to see what this project entails internationally.
Project Summary
Similar to its English counterpart -ing, the -ung-prefix in German represents one of the most productive means to convert adjectives and verbs to nouns. Generally speaking, whereas English also -ing-prefixing to appear in a wide number of semantic contexts, German is much more restrictive than English with respect to -ung-prefixing. More concretely, German strongly prefers the nominalized forms with the -ung-prefix to refer to telic and/or resultative forms (die Bearbeitung 'the cultivation' vs. *die Arbeitung `the work'). This PIRE project seeks to test whether these particular semantic conditions are at play in both L1 and L2 grammars, particularly with regard to potential 'gray zones' of the morphology-semantics interface. Two tasks, i.e., a morphophonological - analogical modeling task involving nonce forms and a rating task, will probe to what extent these particular semantic conditions play in licensing novel and unfamiliar morphological forms in German.