Chapter 6. Endocentric compounds with nominal heads and nominal/adjectival modifiers

This chapter describes the structure and evolution of Spanish compounding patterns whose head constituent is a nominal, modified by either another nominal or an adjective. Since the head can appear first or last, this yields a total of four possible patterns (Table 6.1). All four have moderate to high productivity over the centuries. Those with adjectival heads have syntactic parallels, from which they are sometimes hard to distinguish unequivocally. Numerous tests have been designed to do so, but even then, the nature of historical data sometimes precludes their systematic application, resulting in some uncertainty in the demarcation of these classes, as shall be discussed in the relevant sections.