Synthetic compounds: syntax or semantics?

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Oxford University Press. , 2020

Subordinate and synthetic represent well-attested modes of compounding across languages. Although the two classes exhibit some structural and interpretative analogies cross-linguistically, they denote distinct phenomena and entail different parameters of classification. Specifically, subordinate makes reference to the grammatical relation between the compound members, which hold a syntactic dependency (i.e., head-argument) relation; synthetic makes reference to the synthesis or concomitance of two processes (i.e., compounding and derivation). Therefore, while the former term implies the presence of a syntactic relation realized at the word level, the latter has strictly morphological implications and does not directly hinge on the nature of the relation between the compound members. Typical examples of subordinate compounds are [V+N]N formations like pickpocket, a class which is scarcely productive in English but largely attested in most Romance and many other languages (e.g., Italian lavapiatti 'wash-dishes, dishwater'). Other instances of subordinate compounds are of the type [V+N]V, differing from the pickpocket type since the output is a verb, as in Chinese dài-găng 'wait for-post, wait for a job'. The presence of a verb, however, is not compulsory since possible instances of subordinate compounds can be found among [N+N]N, [A+N]A, and [P+N]N/A compounds, among others: The consistent feature across subordinate compounds is the complementation relation holding between the constituents, whereby one of the two fills in an argumental slot of the other constituent. For instance, the N tetto 'roof' complements P in the Italian compound senza-tetto 'without-roof, homeless person', and the N stazione 'station' is the internal argument of the relational noun capo in capo-stazione 'chief-station, station-master'. Synthetic compounds can envisage a subordination relation, as in truck driv-er/-ing, where truck is the internal argument of driver (or driving), so that they are often viewed as the prototypical subordinates. However, subordination does not feature in all synthetic compounds whose members can hold a modification/attribution relation, as in short-legged and three-dimensional: In these cases, the adjective (or numeral) is not an argument but a modifier of the other constituent. The hallmark of a synthetic compound is the presence of a derivational affix having scope over a compound/complex form, though being linearly attached and forming an established (or possible) word with one

This thesis focuses on English N+N compounds and the primary purpose of the study is to investigate the way in which compounded structures acquire their meaning and to check the way in which the semantics of each of the constituents contributes to the overall meaning of the structure. The way in which such contributions are made should be inferable from the linguistic analysis of the structure and meaning of compounds. In order to do this, the thesis looks first at the morphological productivity of the constituents comprising a compound. The second aim is to identify whether the productivity of a compound constituent on the morphological level coincides with the productivity of the semantic relation realised in the constituent family. The discussion of the results obtained from a corpus study provides plausible explanations for the regularities noted in the course of the analysis by using some of the relevant principles from the complex of approaches including the Construction Gramm...

2013

It is widely acknowledged in the literature that the common function of the modifier in nominal compounds is the classifying function. Classifying modifiers specify what kind of entity is being denoted by the head noun, that is, they specify subkinds; e.g. apple juice ‘a kind of juice made from apples’. While the classifying function can certainly be regarded as the default function of lexical modification, lexical modifiers in nominal compounds may also have functions other than classification. Drawing on functional types of noun phrase modification from the typological literature, the paper discusses lexical modifiers in German nominal compounds with an attitudinal or an identifying function, and the conditions under which they arise.

Linguistics, 2022

This article studies the role of synthetic-compound families, both formal families and their semantic (or rather conceptual) subfamilies, in the analysis of synthetic compounds (SCs). For this purpose, four formal families of English non-Latinate synthetic compounds sharing their second base and three Latinate families have been investigated. Unlike previous approaches ranging from a purely syntactic treatment of SCs to a more lexical treatment, this study aims at providing a novel explanation for these complex formations. First, it argues that SCs have an ambiguous nature, hovering between (a) morphological suffixation of a verb/word group and (b) morphological derivation and subsequent compounding. Second, it emphasizes the importance of compound families and subfamilies in SCs’ formation and interpretation. By combining a corpus-based analysis with a qualitative synchronic and diachronic investigation of seven compound families – namely X-breaker, X-holder, X-killer, X-maker, X-m...

The notion of compound can be taken as a theoretical concept only if it has a precise definition. In many current discussions it is assumed that such a definition is not available or not possible. Here, I will show how translation can be used as a heuristic to determine a concept of compound that is semantically coherent. This concept includes genitive constructions and constructions of a relational adjective with a noun, but not prepositional constructions in which the preposition expresses part of the meaning. An essential component of the use of compounds for naming is shown to be onomasiological coercion.

Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 2015

In accounting for the properties of morphological constructions, one may adopt a source-oriented view where every property of the whole emanates from the parts or a product-oriented view where the whole may have properties that do not come from the parts. Such properties are called holistic constructional properties. Studies on Akan compounds have been invariably source-oriented, assuming that every property in a compound, including the syntactic category, has to come from its constituents. I show that compounding in Akan is blind to the syntactic category of the constituents. Thus, notwithstanding the syntactic category of the constituents the Akan compound is invariably nominal. This paper, therefore, provides evidence of holistic properties of morphological constructions in the form of the syntactic category of Akan compounds. I also present a Construction Morphology modelling of the syntactic category of the Akan compound as a holistic constructional property which is inherited from a constructional meta-schema that is pre-specified to be nominal. Finally, I posit and exemplify four schemas which inherit the category N from the meta-schema but differ in terms of the presence and position of a head constituent.

The status of -oor on the allomorphy of neo-classical compounds

Language Sciences, 2017

A new perspective on how to account for the syntactic category of synthetic compounds.Synthetic compounds do not have to be endocentric; they may be exocentric.The syntactic category of Akan compounds is a holistic constructional property.The tonal melody of Akan compounds may reflect their degree of semantic transparency.The noun constituent of an exocentric synthetic compound may be object or subject.A synthetic compound is regarded as an endocentric construction in which a deverbal nominal head inherits the internal argument of the underlying verb. The Akan noun-verb nominal compound is analysed as a synthetic noun-noun compound with a deverbal right-hand constituent. This is based on a pattern of downstep observed on the first syllable of the second constituent, triggered by a putative floating low tone of a deleted nominal(izing) prefix. This approach, which makes the compound endocentric, is needed to account for the nominal syntactic category of the compound, given that the left-hand nominal constituent is not the head. In this paper, we discuss and reject this endocentric analysis, showing that the argument for the nominal status of the right-hand constituent based on tonal melody alone is weak because some constructs which meet the structural requirement fail to exhibit the specified tonal melody. We argue, however, that we can maintain the synthetic compound analysis without committing to defend the view that the right-hand constituent is nominalized. This is the exocentric synthetic compound view. We present a constructionist account in which the syntactic category is a holistic constructional property of the compound, which is inherited from a meta-schema for Akan compounding. We also present a preliminary constructionist account of the tonal melody of the compound.

Syntax, 2017

This article is an addendum to recent contributions on the structure of compounds in root‐based frameworks, such as the Exoskeletal Model (Borer , :chap. 6, 2013b) or Distributed Morphology (Harley ). It presents a subtype of Dutch primary compounds of which the nonhead is demonstrably a bare root. The nonhead of this type of compounding is fully acategorial. It does not contain categorial heads (i.e., little heads) and neither is it categorized otherwise. As such, the discussion substantiates the root hypothesis (Halle & Marantz ; Borer ,b, ) and supports the view that the root does not need to be licensed by superstructure in order to be interpretable or realizable (see Alexiadou & Lohndal , pace Arad , Marantz , Ramchand , Starke ).

Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 2015

In accounting for the properties of morphological constructions, one may adopt a sourceoriented view where every property of the whole emanates from the parts or a product-oriented view where the whole may have properties that do not come from the parts. Such properties are called holistic constructional properties. Studies on Akan compounds have been invariably source-oriented, assuming that every property in a compound, including the syntactic category, has to come from its constituents. I show that compounding in Akan is blind to the syntactic category of the constituents. Thus, notwithstanding the syntactic category of the constituents the Akan compound is invariably nominal. This paper, therefore, provides evidence of holistic properties of morphological constructions in the form of the syntactic category of Akan compounds. I also present a Construction Morphology modelling of the syntactic category of the Akan compound as a holistic constructional property which is inherited from a constructional meta-schema that is pre-specified to be nominal. Finally, I posit and exemplify four schemas which inherit the category N from the meta-schema but differ in terms of the presence and position of a head constituent.

Over the last decades, compounding and the compounds of several languages have witnessed an increasing interest (see, for instance, the publication of The Oxford Handbook of Compounding, edited by Lieber and Štekauer 2009), and among the most renowned linguists who have been working on this topic for more than forty years is Laurie Bauer. The publication of his recent book Compounds and Compounding is very timely, not only for the prominence of the subject, but also because it shifts the focus towards a thorough deliberation of data and a valuable assessment of what has been said and been done in the field of compounds, particularly in that of English compounds. Bauer discusses most of the existing proposals and at the same time raises a lot of questions. Although he does not offer clear-cut answers, he encourages the debate on several issues and shows that there are "several avenues" for further developments in the study of compounding, even in that of one of the best investigated languages, that is, English. All scholars may not agree with some of the possible explanations put forward by the author (see, for instance, the delineation of headedness in exocentric compounds, pp. 64-70). However, a variety of alternative views are discussed, questions range from the most fundamental (e.g. what is a compound) to minor ones (the status of the internal-o-in neoclassical compounds), solid argumentation is provided in favor of one or the other solution, and doors are open to further investigation. There is no specific framework which explicitly governs the theoretical position that seems to be preferred by the author and he does not go into detailed formal analyses of the data. Nevertheless, it is obvious that he is influenced by cognitive theory and construction grammar in his attempt to raise questions and articulate theoretical views about compounding. The book consists of seven chapters and a big part of the comprised information has been obtained from already published literature by Bauer himself. The contents are illustrated by a number of figures and tables, an Appendix deals with the lexical nature of one, and the usual additional material is found, that is, a list of abbreviations and notational conventions, a rich section of references and two indexes, a language index and a general index.

2001

Complex lexical units: compounds and multi-word expression, edited by Barbara Schlücker. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2019

This volume deals with compounds (e. g., boat house, softball) and multi-word expressions (piece of cake, dry cough) in European languages. Compounds and multi-word expressions (henceforth MWEs) are similar as they are both lexical units and complex, made up of at least two constituents. The most basic difference between compounds and MWEs seems to be that the former are the product of a morphological operation and the latter result from syntactic processes. This is, admittedly, a very vague distinction. However, as soon as one takes into account more than one specific language (or language family), it seems that this is the closest one may come to a definition that is more or less applicable to the European languages. In fact, in light of Romance examples such as French glace au chocolat, Spanish helado de chocolate ‘chocolate ice cream’ which have often been analyzed as compounds although they contain syntactic relational markers, even the morphological criterion for compoundhood seems to be questionable. Further complicating matters, whereas in many languages compounds are regarded as being opposed to MWEs, in other languages, and particularly in English, compounds are often regarded as a kind of MWE. In addition, for languages that are assumed to have an opposition between compounds and MWEs, the question arises of whether compounds and MWEs act in competition or complementation with regard to the formation of new lexical units. Given this background, the aim of the volume is to present an overview of compounds and MWEs in a sample of European languages. Central questions that are discussed for each language concern the formal distinction between compounds and MWEs (in particular prosodic, morphological, and syntactic properties), the relation between compounding and MWE formation as well as the conclusions concerning the theory of grammar and the lexicon that follow from these observations. Although several comprehensive volumes on compounding and phraseology have appeared in recent (and not so recent) years (cf. Scalise (ed.) 1992; Burger et al. (eds.) 2007; Lieber/Štekauer (eds.) 2009a; Gaeta/Grossmann (eds.) 2009; Scalise/Vogel (eds.) 2010; Gaeta/Schlücker (eds.) 2012), the relationship between compounds and MWEs with respect to their status in lexicon and grammar has received comparatively little attention (cf. Hüning/Schlücker 2015 for an overview). For this reason, this relationship constitutes the central focus of this volume. The aim of the present chapter is to review the language-specific properties, bring them together and compare them against German. German is well-known for its propensity for (nominal) compounding, as compared to, e. g., French. Also, there is a rather clear demarcation line between compounds and MWEs in German, in contrast to English, for instance. Taking German as a reference point may help to shed more light on some of the crucial questions with respect to the compound-MWE relationship in the various European languages such as, for instance, the potential competition between the two processes, or their demarcation line. By way of language comparison, the differences and commonalities between languages – both within language families and across these borders – become clearer, ultimately revealing that a cross-linguistically valid definition of compounds and the demarcation from MWEs may be impossible, given that languages vary greatly in their defining properties and in the number and productivity of compound and MWE subpatterns. The volume contains chapters on English, German, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Russian, Polish, Finnish, and Hungarian. Although this sample is neither complete nor representative of “the” languages of Europe, it nevertheless provides thorough analyses of a large set of central European languages. Importantly, it should be noted that the selection here is mostly due to various practical reasons, rather than an assessment of the relevance of languages. In addition to the languages mentioned, the present chapter also comprises an overview of the North Germanic languages. The structure of this chapter is as follows: Section 2 starts with general considerations about the lexicon and the lexicon-syntax interface and discusses basic notions such as morphological vs. syntactic lexical unit, lexicalization, and the problem of correspondence. Section 3 discusses compounds and MWEs against the background of German, sorted by language families. The chapter ends with a brief conclusion in Section 4.

Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 2010

This chapter focuses on a traditional issue of word formation, namely synthetic compounds. The three basic approaches to the question will be reviewed and analyzed with the help of a large text corpus. The latter is of paramount importance for the analysis because dictionaries usually are not reliable for investigating highly productive word formation patterns and especially German compounding. It is shown that purely syntactic approaches do not cope well with the data, whereas a lexical approach like Construction Morphology is able to grasp the fine-grained distributional properties displayed by compounds. Furthermore, the corpus-based analysis allows us to shed some light on the complex network of semantic properties guiding the selective solidarity between deverbal head and nominal modifier by representing argument structure as a bundle of Dowty's base-roles. * This chapter results from a research developed within the PRIN-project COMPONET coordinated by Sergio Scalise (2005-07). I am deeply indebted with the editors and with an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments. Needless to say, opinions expressed and remaining mistakes are of my own responsability. Sergio Scalise & Irene Vogel (eds.), Cross-Disciplinary Issues in Compounding, Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 219-235.

Italian Journal of Linguistics , 2014

This paper investigates the morphology-syntax interface by focusing on the interfixation properties of compound structures. The starting point of this study is the conception that compound formation is a morphological process situated closely to syntax. Evidence is taken from a contrastive analysis between German and Modern Greek compounds. Although these two languages share many morphological properties related to the word-formation process of compounding, they differ in many aspects as far as the existence of a linking element in a compound is concerned. Through the contrastive analysis of the properties of the linking element a clearer picture can be given concerning the closeness of German and Modern Greek compound formations to syntax.