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Article published In: Lingvisticæ Investigationes
Vol. 41:2 (2018) ► pp.213–223

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Does French have verbal-nexus Noun+Noun compounds?

 | University of South Bohemia
Published online: 4 February 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1075/li.00020.rad
Abstract
Though components of subordinate NN compounds may in principle display a wide variety of semantic relationships, data from Romance suggest that in languages where the NN pattern is still new and peripheral, the different subtypes of NN compounds do not necessarily emerge at the same rhythm. The aim of this article is to verify the assumption that French, unlike Italian, does not have an available word-formation pattern of verbal-nexus NN compounds (i.e. compounds in which the verb-argument relationship is featured). With reference to extensive corpus data, it will be demonstrated that in both languages many different subtypes of verbal-nexus NN compounds are attested, but Italian has already developed a consistent and regular word-formation paradigm based on one particular subtype of verbal-nexus NN compounds, while French data do not display such regularity, and the verbal-nexus pattern is much more peripheral in this language.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Verbal-nexus compounds and their typology
  • 3.Studies on French verbal-nexus compounds
  • 4.Data gathering
  • 5.Analysis of the data
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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