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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

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Remarks on the semantics and paradigmaticity of NN compounds

 | University of Granada
Published online: 30 October 2020
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.00015.fer
Abstract
English Noun+Noun compounding has garnered the attention of morphologists due to characteristics that involve its semantics (Bauer, L., & Tarasova, E. (2010). The meaning link in nominal compounds. SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics, 101, 1–18.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Jackendoff, R. (2009). Compounding in the Parallel Architecture and Conceptual Semantics. In R. Lieber & P. Štekauer (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of compounding (pp.105–129). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), degree of productivity (Bauer, L., Beliaeva, N., & Tarasova, E. (2019). Recalibrating productivity: Factors involved. Zeitschrift für Wortbildung / Journal of Word Formation, 3(1), 44–80. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Maguire, P., Wisniewski, E. J., & Storms, G. (2010). A corpus study of semantic patterns in compounding. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 6(1), 49–73. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) and possible paradigmatic nature ( (in press). Paradigmaticity in compounding. In J. Fernández-Domínguez, A. Bagasheva & C. Lara-Clares (Eds.), Paradigmatic relations in word-formation. Leiden: Brill.; Boyé, G., & Schalchli, G. (2016). The status of paradigms. In A. Hippisley & G. Stump (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of morphology (pp.206–234). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). 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.
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
References (58)
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Bagasheva, Alexandra & Jesús Fernández-Domínguez
2022. Fact-checking on compound verbs in English. In Paradigms in Word Formation [Studies in Language Companion Series, 225], ► pp. 69 ff. DOI logo

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