Mots nouveaux et nouvelles significations Que nous apprennent les mots composés ?

The project “Wortwarte” aims at collecting and documenting new words in German. The collection is based on German newspaper texts and supports lexicologists and lexicographers to describe lexical and morphological aspects of language change. One of the shortcomings of the approach is that new words can be detected only formally. Semantic change of existing words is still beyond the scope of the project. In this paper, however, it will be argued that a retrospective analysis of the collected data, in particular of the huge number of German compounds, allows insights into meaning changes of the elements of these compounds, in particular of the morphological head of such constructions. I will illustrate this point with three examples. The paper ends with some perspectives on the potential to partially automate the analysis.