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Description:
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Since the middle of the twentieth century it has been widely believed that
English words are less integrated into word families than German words.
Ernst Leisi attributed this so-called dissociation to the large proportion
of Romance words that have entered the originally Germanic English language
in the course of its history. Even though fairly common, these hypotheses
have not yet been tested empirically. This book thus presents a long-due
study which subjects the 2,500 most frequent English and German lemmas to
various analyses. For instance, they are analysed into constituents to
which they are both formally and semantically related. In addition,
morphosemantically related complex words containing the English and German
list items are sought for. The approach adopted here, which considers a
variety of variables such as formal differences and semantic obstacles,
allows for a highly differentiated answer to the question whether the
English vocabulary is dissociated or not.The last part of the book
discusses the relevance of the study’s surprising results with respect to
the mental lexicon as well as language learning and teaching.
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