Appositional compounds in the Upper Sorbian language – Preliminary research

The article focuses on Upper Sorbian appositional noun compounds, such as moler-spisowaćel ‘painter-writer’. As this phenomenon has not been extensively studied to date, the study aims to investigate these formations with respect to their usage, structure, and functions. The research is based on data extracted from the Upper Sorbian text corpus, comprising 382 examples that represent over 300 different combinations. The findings indicate that: 1) appositional noun compounds appeared in large numbers in Upper Sorbian after World War II; 2) these compounds are productive mechanisms of word formation, with numerous new compounds emerging alongside older ones; and 3) they exhibit diverse formal-semantic structures and functional-stylistic characteristics.