Volume 68, Issue 3 - Special Issue: Phrasal compounds from a typological and theoretical perspective, Issue Editors: Carola Trips and Jaklin Kornfilt

This volume is a collection of papers on typological and theoretical aspects of phrasal compounds. It is based on talks on this topic held during a workshop, funded by the DFG and the NSF, in June 2013 in Mannheim. The papers introduce new data from a number of languages like English, German, Italian, Greek, Turkish and some Turkic languages, and deal with this phenomenon from different theoretical perspectives, locating it on different levels of language and its interfaces. By comparing the phenomenon in different languages we seek to gain a better understanding of its structural, semantic and other properties.

In phrasal compounds of the type XP+Y, one can assume a relation “R” that holds between the head and the non-head just as in ordinary N+N compounds. The paper discusses the question how “R” should be understood. Three recent approaches, i.e., construction morphology, parallel architecture view, and indexicalism are discussed. It is argued that all approaches lack a pragmatic component which is necessary for modeling pragmatic inferencing with respect to phrasal compounds. Thus, an “unspecific meaning” approach to the semantics of phrasal compounds, together with contextualist views on pragmatic enrichment, is a serious alternative to the approaches discussed.

As phrasal compounds seem to be words that contain syntactic phrases they are a prominent case against the strict separation of morphology from syntax. However, it is not obvious at all that phrasal compounds do contain syntactic phrases. First, as for phrasal compounds whose non-head constituent is a quote, there is every reason to assume that they are NN compounds – whether or not the quote is the quote of a phrase. Second, taking the different types of phrasal compounds into account it is justified to assume that they do not contain syntactic phrases if one acknowledges phrase-to-word conversion.

This paper discusses the properties of phrasal compounds in English, German, Turkish and Sakha, a Turkic language. Two questions are addressed: 1. What is the formal status of elements building (phrasal) compounds? 2. How can we distinguish compounds from phrasal forms? A number of traditional definitions and criteria are discussed, and the result is that they do not suffice to properly account for compounds, let alone phrasal compounds. The languages under discussion are investigated and compared. The result is that in English, German and Turkish tight semantic relations exist between the phrasal non-head and head, but in Turkish additional structural restrictions apply, (especially in reference to the (non)-argument status of the head) which may be due to the rich morphology of this language. The study on Sakha reveals that some phrasal compound types are similar to the Turkish types, without being identical to them.

In this paper, we compare Modern Greek nominal compounds to their Turkish counterparts and reveal that Modern Greek nominal compounds under investigation are morphological while Turkish ones are syntactically built. Based on this, we offer an explanation for the availability of phrasal compounds in Turkish but not in Modern Greek: phrase-level items can be involved in syntactic compounds, but not in morphological compounds involving solely morphological items. The study reveals that the locus of compound formation is not confined to a single module both cross-linguistically and within a language, but the locus of a specific type of compound in a language entails whether or not phrasal compounds with the same compound structure can also occur in that specific language.

To date, studies of phrasal compounds, most of which are on Germanic languages, have been inconclusive with respect to whether the non-heads are phrases or quotations. In this paper, I present syntactic, semantic, and prosodic evidence from a typologically different language, Turkish, to distinguish between the two types. I will show that what look like equally complex constructions turn out to differ radically in complexity and in terms of their internal structure; phrases that are sensitive to syntax versus quotations which are not, and head-complement relations versus type-token relations. I further discuss the structural implications of having phrasal units within morphological units, arguing that this is a natural phenomenon within frameworks where the relation between morphology and syntax is bidirectional.

Phrasal compounds did not constitute a highly debated issue in Italian, apart from some sporadic observations (Ricca 2005) on peculiar compounds as, for example, V+N exocentric compounds like spazzaneve ‘snowplough’ that admit NP constituents. This paper is devoted to the analysis of a group of N+NP constructions, found in the ItTenTen10 corpus, a corpus of 2.588.873.046 words investigated by means of the Sketch-Engine, with the purpose of establishing whether phrasal compounding is a phenomenon present in Italian too.