In this article particular emphasis is laid on the compounds which constitute parts of the titles of the press articles which were published in the online version of the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper between 1 August 2016 and 31 October 2016. The examples selected from the author’s research corpus make it possible to state that title is the kind of text which is highly open to word games and linguistic puns. The research conducted demonstrates and explains the role that compounds – especially occasionalisms which are parts of the press article titles under analysis – play in terms of assigning functional tasks to the given press titles (headlines). The research corpus gathered for the purpose of the analysis in the present article, i.e. selected press article titles, serves as a means of describing not only general linguistic traits of the said titles from the semantic and syntactic point of view, but also, and to an even larger extent, their sociolinguistic, i.e. pragmatic functions. Particular atten-tion is drawn to the role of compounds in performing the communicative function assigned to press article titles.

Every language is characterized by numerous phenomena which deserve particular attention. Among such phenomena in the German language, one should undoubtedly mention multi-part word compounds, which in this article are also referred to as multiple complex compounds, tapeworm compounds or tapeworm words. Various questions related to this German language phenomenon made it possible to establish the linguistic and extra-linguistic factors responsible for creating those long and extremely long compounds, the areas in which they are created, their length (depending on the number of letters), their position in the classifi cation of speech parts and their forms. In order to arrive at research conclusions in the present article, I have used the COSMAS II corpus. Examples of multi-part compounds come from FOCUS magazine articles published between January 2000 and June 2014.