The Semantics of Compounding

Presents three frameworks for studying morphology, offering different insights into the meaning of compounds.

Pius ten Hacken (Edited by)

9781107099708, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 21 April 2016

266 pages, 6 b/w illus. 10 tables
23.5 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.53 kg

The question of how to determine the meaning of compounds was prominent in early generative morphology, but lost importance after the late 1970s. In the past decade, it has been revived by the emergence of a number of frameworks that are better suited to studying this question than earlier ones. In this book, three frameworks for studying the semantics of compounding are presented by their initiators: Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture, Lieber's theory of lexical semantics, and Štekauer's onomasiological theory. Common to these presentations is a focus on English noun-noun compounds. In the following chapters, these theories are then applied to different types of compounding (phrasal, A+N, neoclassical) and other languages (French, German, Swedish, Greek). Finally, a comparison highlights how each framework offers particular insight into the meaning of compounds. An exciting new contribution to the field, this book will be of interest to morphologists, semanticists and cognitive linguists.

1. Introduction: compounds and their meaning Pius ten Hacken
Part I. Frameworks: 2. English noun-noun compounds in conceptual semantics Ray Jackendoff
3. Compounding in the lexical semantic framework Rochelle Lieber
4. Compounding from an onomasiological perspective Pavol Štekauer
Part II. Noun-Noun Compounds: 5. Categorizing the modification relations in French relational subordinate [NN]N compounds Pierre J. L. Arnaud
6. The semantics of NN combinations in Greek Zoe Gavriilidou
7. The semantics of compounds in Swedish child language Ingmarie Mellenius and Maria Rosenberg
8. The semantics of primary NN compounds: from form to meaning, and from meaning to form Jesús Fernández-Domínguez
Part III. Other Compound Types: 9. An analysis of phrasal compounds in the model of parallel architecture Carola Trips
10. Adjective-noun compounding in parallel architecture Barbara Schlücker
11. Neoclassical compounds in the onomasiological approach Renáta Panocová
12. Three analyses of compounding: a comparison Pius ten Hacken.

Subject Areas: Grammar, syntax & morphology [CFK], Semantics, discourse analysis, etc [CFG], Linguistics [CF], Language [C]