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Part of
Romance Perspectives on Construction Grammar
Edited by Hans C. Boas and Francisco Gonzálvez-García
[Constructional Approaches to Language 15] 2014
► pp. 37–78

Chapter 2. The role of constructional meanings in novel verb-noun compounds in Spanish

| University of North Texas

The present study addresses the issues of the comprehension and creation of Spanish verb-noun novel compounds in relation to the two types of constructions that have been proposed in Yoon (2009). In order to determine if a construction causes semantic ‘coercion’ in the interpretation and creation of a novel compound, I have conducted a study consisting of comprehension and production tasks. The results suggest that the two types of verb-noun compound constructions in Spanish indeed exist in language users’ grammar, but external constraints such as world knowledge in a particular dialect of the language, metonymy and metaphor, and a relation between frequencies and analogies, are also deemed important in order to fully understand the cognitive mechanism that regulates the productivity of the Spanish verb-noun compound.

Published online: 28 August 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.15.02yoo
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