A topic in historical linguistics: the death of compounds in Germanic

Most discussions of diachronic morphology focus on inflectional morphology, and word-formation tends to be ignored. In this paper I focus firstly on compounding, which is even more rarely discussed than derivation, and secondly on the way in which compounds disappear. Since compounds are known to be prolific in the Germanic languages, consideration of what happens when compound patterns vanish raises some interesting perspectives on the way in which the brain deals with compounds.