What directionality diagnostics can tell us about the formation of zero-nominals in German

This paper addresses German zero-nominals such as '(der) Lauf' ‘(the) run’ (↔ 'laufen' ‘to run’), whose theoretical modeling is challenging in the absence of morphological marking. Assuming that directionality diagnostics can be used to provide evidence in favor either of derivational theories (Marchand 1963a, 1964; Kiparsky 1982) or of underspecification accounts (Farrell 2001; Borer 2013), a self-collected data set of 60 German verb-noun pairs is investigated on the basis of five diagnostics. The results indicate that most zero-nominals are zero-derived from verbal bases, which largely supports a directional derivational analysis. A non-directional analysis is motivated for those word pairs where no derivational direction can be identified