The present study investigates the occasionalisms in three comedies of
the Austrian writer Johann Nepomuk Nestroy (1801–1862) in systematic comparison
with his rival O. F. Berg and his French models. With corpus-linguistic methods his
occasionalisms can be identified in relation to contemporary and modern language
use. 103 of them are formed according to fully productive word-formation patterns,
only 1 in analogy to an unproductive pattern and only 2–3 are ungrammatical and
1 partially extragrammatical. Thus there is nearly no audacious poetic license, but
many of them, especially compounds, can surprise their recipients by the low degree
of compatibility between their constituents. Furthermore we investigate the contextual
and cotextual motivation of occasionalisms and their distribution among the
characters of each play. Nestroy appears to form occasionalisms for increasing the
theatrical effect of word play and for stimulating metalinguistic reflection.

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• Johann Nepomuk Nestroy (1801–1862) als großer Wortbildner Neue korpuslinguistische Ansätze für die Auswertung okkasionalistischer Neubildungen