Semantic headedness and categorization of -cum- compounds

Compounds such as actress-cum-model, pub-cum-hotel or military-cum-religious represent mainly an alternative construction to coordinative compounds of the singer-songwriter type. Although most of them are double-headed, some can show semantic left-headedness. We have detected six main semantic groups out of a corpus of 300 types of -cum- nominal compounds. They correspond, in descending order of frequency, to people’s professional or leisure activities; buildings, rooms, and other places; literary and audio-visual genres; pieces of furniture, clothes, and other objects; abstract nouns; and toponyms, and anthroponyms. Under the heading “People”, we consider two main subheadings: team-sports players and antonymous occupations or functions.