English synthetic compounds in -er and their German and Italian correspondences

The reason for choosing the topic for our contribution to this Festschrift is that Franz Rainer has worked himself both on synthetic compounds (henceforth SCs) and very much on Italian and German morphology. The bases of our study are our publications Mattiello / Dressler (2021, 2022) on English SCs focussed on examples derived from a small number of English Germanic and Latinate verbs and with many more data than we can investigate here. In this contribution we analyse a much smaller set of English SCs, which are derived from various English verbs and which contain only Germanic verbs, in order to investigate whether we can confirm the results of our previous articles. The bulk of our contribution consists of our description of a selected but representative subset of their German and Italian correspondences. German SCs are more similar than Italian SCs to English SCs, because of the same suffix used and their analogous structure, productivity and profitability. All three languages have analogous agent and instrument nouns with analogous degrees of morphosemantic transparency/opacity. As previously done with English SCs, we analyse also German and Italian SCs by using the concepts of superposition and external and internal dualism (taken from quantum physics and adapted to linguistics, adding weighting of superposed options). All data have been drawn from electronic corpora; weighting seems to us impossible in quantum physics. In our analysis, we study the distribution of German and Italian correspondences of English SCs, including the distinction among SCs vs. noun phrases vs. derivations again, as well as between agents and instruments (in the large sense, as in human ice+break+er ‘one who starts a conversation’ vs. the homophonous term for ‘a ship that breaks the ice’). Among derivations we try to explain why Italian has several instrument nouns in masculine +tore, but not in feminine +trice, although these exist in Italian.