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Article published In:
Representation and Processing in Bilingual Morphology
Edited by Jennifer R. Austin
[Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 9:1] 2019
► pp. 42–72

Compounding and derivation

On the ‘promiscuity’ of derivational affixes

| University of Ottawa | Universidad Nebrija
| University of Ottawa | UiT – The Arctic University of Norway
Inflectional affixes only adhere to the head of Noun-Noun (NN) compounds which implies that the plural of casa cuna (‘crib house’) or hombre lobo (‘werewolf’) is casa-s cuna (‘crib houses’) and hombre-s lobo (‘werewolves’) respectively, while *casa cuna-s and *hombre lobo-s ‒ with the plural inflectional affix on the modifier ‒ are ungrammatical. There seems to be more flexibility when it comes to derivational affixes since, in principle, the evaluative diminutive affix - ito appears to have scope over the whole compound, regardless of whether it is attached to the head or the modifier: cas-ita cuna / casa cun-ita and hombre-c-ito lobo / hombre lob-ito . This would imply that the operation that results in the expression of plurality of the whole word via the inflectional affix - s located on the semantic argument (the head of the compound), is more categorical than the one that regulates the scope of derivational morphemes (contra Zwicky, 1985). It would also imply that Cinque’s (2005) proposal according to which modifiers can c-command Nouns may be more in line with the behaviour of derivational affixes in Spanish NN compounds. Since this is a topic that has neither been discussed by Spanish grammarians nor received attention in the psycholinguistic literature, we have administered a Picture Selection Task with NN compounds exhibiting evaluative diminutive affixes to groups of L1 Spanish and L1 English-L2 Spanish speakers. Results show that for L1 Spanish speakers it is the affix on the head that has scope over the whole compound (in line with Zwicky’s 1985 proposal) while the L2 Spanish speakers treat derivational affixes as only having scope over the element to which they are attached.
Keywords: noun-noun compounds, evaluative affixes, headedness
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.NN Spanish compounds: Headedness and scope of derivative affixes
  • 3.NN compounds in native and non-native Spanish
  • 4.The present study
    • 4.1Participants
    • 4.2Materials
    • 4.3Design
    • 4.4Procedure
  • 5.Results
  • 6.Discussion
    • 6.1Native and non-native interpretations of -ito
    • 6.2Animate versus inanimate compounds
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 October 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.16026.lic
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Schapansky, Nathalie
2023. French V-N compounds: Plural marking, headedness endocentricity/exocentricity continuum. Lingua 288 ► pp. 103521 ff. DOI logo
Austin, Jennifer
2019. Representation and processing in bilingual morphology. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 9:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

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