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Article published In:
Semantics and Psychology of Complex Words
Edited by Christina L. Gagné and Thomas L. Spalding
[The Mental Lexicon 15:1] 2020
► pp. 79–100

Remarks on the semantics and paradigmaticity of NN compounds

| University of Granada
English Noun+Noun compounding has garnered the attention of morphologists due to characteristics that involve its semantics (Bauer & Tarasova, 2010; Jackendoff, 2009), degree of productivity (Bauer, Beliaeva, & Tarasova, 2019; Maguire, Wisniewski, & Storms, 2010) and possible paradigmatic nature (Bagasheva, in press; Boyé & Schalchli, 2016). This article addresses the above questions from an inclusive perspective with the aim of bringing together various unsolved issues in the study of this morphological process. The experiment exploits data from the BNC Sampler and the Oxford English Dictionary, from which morphological and semantic information is extracted in order to fathom the contribution of nominal root compounding to the lexicon. The results show that the paradigmatic nature, semantics and high productivity of NN compounding are all closely interrelated, which explains certain characteristics associated to the current status of this process and its role in the enrichment of the lexicon.
Keywords: compounding, corpus-based, derivational paradigms, modifiers, productivity, semantics, word-formation paradigms
Article outline
  • Antecedents
  • Data preparation
  • The Misfits of NN compounding
  • The categorization of compound semantics
  • The paradigmaticity of compounding
  • Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • List of abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 30 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.00015.fer
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