Title: N+N compounding in English : semantic categories and the weight of modifiers
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2010, vol. 36, iss. 1, pp. [47]-76
Extent
[47]-76
-
ISSN0524-6881 (print)1805-0867 (online)
Stable URL (handle): https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/105088
Type: Article
Language
License: Not specified license
Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.
Abstract(s)
Based on a 3,093-item corpus, this paper delves into the meaning relationship between the two constituents of N+N compounds. After tackling theoretical questions such as semantic categories and prototypes of compounds, some methodological details are considered and explanations provided on the collection of the corpus. Next, the experimental section examines the semantics of N+N compounding and, by means of various computations, it describes and analyzes to what extent the presence of a given modifier influences the overall meaning of these lexemes. Finally, the aspects from the theoretical and the practical sections are combined, and future prospects on the topic assessed.
References
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[18] Frege, Gottlob (1970[1903]) Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, vol. ii. In: Geach, Peter and Max Black (eds.) Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, section 56. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
[19] Gagné, Christina L. (2002) 'Lexical and relational influences on the processing of novel compounds'. Brain and Language 81, 723–735. | DOI 10.1006/brln.2001.2559
[20] Gagné, Christina L. (2009) 'Psycholinguistic perspectives'. In: Lieber, Rochelle and Pavol Štekauer (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Compounding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 255–271.
[21] Gagné, Christina L. and Edward J. Shoben (1997) 'Influence of thematic relations on the comprehension of modifier-noun combinations'. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 23(1), 71–87.
[22] Gagné, Christina L. and Edward J. Shoben (2002) 'Priming relations in ambiguous noun-noun compounds'. Memory and Cognition 30(4), 637–646. | DOI 10.3758/BF03194965
[23] Gagné, Christina L. and Thomas L. Spalding (2006a) 'Using conceptual combination research to better understand novel compound words'. SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics 3(2), 9–16. http://www.pulib.sk/skase/Volumes/JTL06/2.pdf. Accessed 30 December 2009.
[24] Gagné, C. L. and Thomas L. Spalding (2006b) 'Relation availability was not confounded with familiarity or plausibility in Gagné and Shoben (1997): Comment on Wisniewski and Murphy (2005)'. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 32, 1431–1437; discussion 1438–1442.
[25] Girju, Roxana, Dan Moldovan, Marta Tatu and Daniel Antohe (2005) 'On the semantics of noun compounds'. Computer Speech and Language 19(4), 479–496. | DOI 10.1016/j.csl.2005.02.006
[26] Hatcher, Anna G. (1960) 'An introduction to the analysis of English noun compounds'. Word 16, 356–373. | DOI 10.1080/00437956.1960.11659738
[27] Jespersen, Otto (1942) A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles. Part VI, Morphology. London and Copenhagen: Munksgaard.
[28] Kay, Paul and Karl E. Zimmer (1976) 'On the semantics of compounds and genitives in English'. Paper presented at the Sixth California Linguistics Association, San Diego State University.
[29] Körtvélyessy, L. (2008) Vplyv sociolingvistických faktorov na produktivitu v slovotvorbe. Ph.D dissertation.
[30] Labov, William (1973) 'The boundaries of words and their meanings'. In: Bailey, Charles-James and Roger W. Shuy (eds.) New Ways of Analyzing Variation in English. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 340–373.
[31] Lees, Robert B. (1960) The Grammar of English Nominalizations. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
[32] Lees, Robert B. (1970) 'Problems in the grammatical analysis of English nominal compounds'. In: Bierwisch, Manfred and Karl E. Heidolph (eds.) Progress in Linguistics. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter, 174–186.
[33] Levi, Judith N. (1978) The Syntax and Semantics of Complex Nominals. New York, NY: Academic Press.
[34] Li, Charles (1971) Semantics and the Structure of Compounds in Chinese. Doctoral dissertation, University of California.
[35] Libben, Gary (2006) 'Why study compound processing? An overview of the issues'. In: Libben, Gary and Gonia Jarema (eds.) The Representation and Processing of Compound Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3–22.
[36] Lieber, Rochelle (1981) On the Organisation of the Lexicon. Doctoral dissertation, Indiana University Linguistics Club.
[37] Lieber, Rochelle (2004) Morphology and Lexical Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[38] Lipka, Leonhard (2002) English Lexicology: Lexical Structure, Word Semantics and Word-Formation. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.
[39] Murphy, Gregory L. (1988) 'Comprehending complex concepts'. Cognitive Science 12, 529–562. | DOI 10.1207/s15516709cog1204_2
[40] Murphy, Gregory L. (1990) 'Noun phrase interpretation and conceptual combination'. Journal of Memory and Language 29(3), 259–288. | DOI 10.1016/0749-596X(90)90001-G
[41] Payne, John and Rodney D. Huddleston (2002) 'Nouns and noun phrases'. In: Huddleston, Rodney D. and Geoffrey K. Pullum (eds.) The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 323–523.
[42] Plag, Ingo (1999) Morphological Productivity: Structural Constraints in English Derivation. Berlin and New York, NY: Mouton de Gruyter.
[43] Plag, Ingo, Gero Kunter, Sabine Lappe and Maria Braun (2008) 'The role of semantics, argument structure and lexicalization in compound stress assignment in English'. Language 84, 760–794. | DOI 10.1353/lan.0.0072
[44] Rosenbach, Anette (2006) 'Descriptive genitives in English: a case study on constructional gradience'. English Language and Linguistics 10, 77–118. | DOI 10.1017/S1360674306001894
[45] Rosenbach, Anette (2007) 'Emerging variation: determiner genitives and noun modifiers in English'. English Language and Linguistics 11, 143–189. | DOI 10.1017/S1360674306002140
[46] Scott, Mike (2004) Oxford Wordsmith Tools, version 4.0.0.376. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/version4/index.htm. Accessed 25 April 2009.
[47] Selkirk, Elisabeth O. (1982) The Syntax of Words. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.
[48] Shimamura, Reiko (1998) 'Lexicalization of syntactic phrases: the case of genitive compounds like woman's magazine'. http://coe-sun.kuis.ac.jp/coe/public/paper/outside/shimamura2.pdf. Accessed 24 February 2010.
[49] Soegaard, Anders (2005) 'Compounding theories and linguistic diversity'. In: Frajzyngier, Zygmunt, Adam Hodges and David S. Rood (eds.) Linguistic Diversity and Language Theories. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 319–337.
[50] Štekauer, Pavol (2000) English Word-Formation. A History of Research (1960–1995). Tübingen: Gunter Narr.
[51] Štekauer, Pavol (2005) Meaning Predictability in Word-Formation: Novel, Context-Free Naming Units. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
[52] Štekauer, Pavol (2009) 'Meaning predictability of novel context-free compounds'. In: Lieber, Rochelle and Pavol Štekauer (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Compounding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 272–297.
[53] ten Hacken, Pius (2009) 'Early generative approaches'. In: Lieber, Rochelle and Pavol Štekauer (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Compounding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 54–77.
[54] Warren, Beatrice (1978) Semantic Patterns of Noun-Noun Compounds. Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis: Göteborg.
[55] Wisniewski, Edward J. and Gregory L. Murphy (2005) 'Frequency of relation type as a determinant of conceptual combination: A reanalysis'. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 31,169–174.
[56] Zimmer, Karl E. (1971) 'Some general observations about nominal compounds'. Working Papers on Language Universals 5, 1–21.
[57] Zimmer, Karl E. (1972) 'Appropriateness conditions for nominal compounds'. Working Papers on Language Universals 8, 3–20.
[2] Abdullah, Nabil and Richard A. Frost (2007) 'Rethinking the semantics of complex nominals'. Proceedings of the 20th Conference of the Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence on Advances in Artificial Intelligence. Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 502–513.
[3] Adams, Valerie (1988) An Introduction to Modern English Word Formation (2nd ed.). London: Longman.
[4] Allen, Margaret R. (1978) Morphological Investigations. University of Connecticut, CT: Storrs.
[5] Bauer, Laurie. 1998 'When is a sequence of two nouns a compound in English?' English Language and Linguistics 2, 65–86.
[6] Bauer, Laurie (2006) 'Compounds and minor word-formation types'. In: Aarts, Bas and April Mc-Mahon (eds.) Handbook of English Linguistics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 483–506.
[7] Bauer, Laurie and Rodney D. Huddleston (2002) 'Lexical word-formation'. In: Huddleston, Rodney D. and Geoffrey K. Pullum (eds.), The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1621–1723.
[8] Beard, Robert (1995) Lexeme-Morpheme Base Morphology: A General Theory of Inflection and Word-Formation. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
[9] Bisetto, Antonietta and Sergio Scalise (1999) 'Compounding: Morphology and/or syntax?'. In: Mereu, Lunella (Ed.) Boundaries of Morphology and Syntax. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 31–48.
[10] Bolinger, Dwight (1961) Generality, Gradience and the All-or-None. 's-Gravenhage: Mouton de Gruyter.
[11] Botha, Rudolf P. (1968) The Function of the Lexicon in Transformational Generative Grammar. The Hague: Mouton
[12] Bühler, Karl (1934) Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Jena: Gustav Fischer.
[13] Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew (1992) Current Morphology. London: Routledge.
[14] Corbin, Danielle (1997) Le Lexique Construit. Méthodologie d'Analyse. Paris: Armand Colin.
[15] Di Sciullo, Anna Maria and Edwin Williams (1987) On the Definition of Word. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.
[16] Downing, Pamela (1977) 'On the creation and use of English compound nouns'. Language 53, 810–842. | DOI 10.2307/412913
[17] Fernández-Domínguez, Jesús (2009) Productivity in Word-Formation. An Approach to N+N Compounding. Bern: Peter Lang.
[18] Frege, Gottlob (1970[1903]) Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, vol. ii. In: Geach, Peter and Max Black (eds.) Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, section 56. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
[19] Gagné, Christina L. (2002) 'Lexical and relational influences on the processing of novel compounds'. Brain and Language 81, 723–735. | DOI 10.1006/brln.2001.2559
[20] Gagné, Christina L. (2009) 'Psycholinguistic perspectives'. In: Lieber, Rochelle and Pavol Štekauer (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Compounding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 255–271.
[21] Gagné, Christina L. and Edward J. Shoben (1997) 'Influence of thematic relations on the comprehension of modifier-noun combinations'. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 23(1), 71–87.
[22] Gagné, Christina L. and Edward J. Shoben (2002) 'Priming relations in ambiguous noun-noun compounds'. Memory and Cognition 30(4), 637–646. | DOI 10.3758/BF03194965
[23] Gagné, Christina L. and Thomas L. Spalding (2006a) 'Using conceptual combination research to better understand novel compound words'. SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics 3(2), 9–16. http://www.pulib.sk/skase/Volumes/JTL06/2.pdf. Accessed 30 December 2009.
[24] Gagné, C. L. and Thomas L. Spalding (2006b) 'Relation availability was not confounded with familiarity or plausibility in Gagné and Shoben (1997): Comment on Wisniewski and Murphy (2005)'. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 32, 1431–1437; discussion 1438–1442.
[25] Girju, Roxana, Dan Moldovan, Marta Tatu and Daniel Antohe (2005) 'On the semantics of noun compounds'. Computer Speech and Language 19(4), 479–496. | DOI 10.1016/j.csl.2005.02.006
[26] Hatcher, Anna G. (1960) 'An introduction to the analysis of English noun compounds'. Word 16, 356–373. | DOI 10.1080/00437956.1960.11659738
[27] Jespersen, Otto (1942) A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles. Part VI, Morphology. London and Copenhagen: Munksgaard.
[28] Kay, Paul and Karl E. Zimmer (1976) 'On the semantics of compounds and genitives in English'. Paper presented at the Sixth California Linguistics Association, San Diego State University.
[29] Körtvélyessy, L. (2008) Vplyv sociolingvistických faktorov na produktivitu v slovotvorbe. Ph.D dissertation.
[30] Labov, William (1973) 'The boundaries of words and their meanings'. In: Bailey, Charles-James and Roger W. Shuy (eds.) New Ways of Analyzing Variation in English. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 340–373.
[31] Lees, Robert B. (1960) The Grammar of English Nominalizations. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
[32] Lees, Robert B. (1970) 'Problems in the grammatical analysis of English nominal compounds'. In: Bierwisch, Manfred and Karl E. Heidolph (eds.) Progress in Linguistics. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter, 174–186.
[33] Levi, Judith N. (1978) The Syntax and Semantics of Complex Nominals. New York, NY: Academic Press.
[34] Li, Charles (1971) Semantics and the Structure of Compounds in Chinese. Doctoral dissertation, University of California.
[35] Libben, Gary (2006) 'Why study compound processing? An overview of the issues'. In: Libben, Gary and Gonia Jarema (eds.) The Representation and Processing of Compound Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3–22.
[36] Lieber, Rochelle (1981) On the Organisation of the Lexicon. Doctoral dissertation, Indiana University Linguistics Club.
[37] Lieber, Rochelle (2004) Morphology and Lexical Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[38] Lipka, Leonhard (2002) English Lexicology: Lexical Structure, Word Semantics and Word-Formation. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.
[39] Murphy, Gregory L. (1988) 'Comprehending complex concepts'. Cognitive Science 12, 529–562. | DOI 10.1207/s15516709cog1204_2
[40] Murphy, Gregory L. (1990) 'Noun phrase interpretation and conceptual combination'. Journal of Memory and Language 29(3), 259–288. | DOI 10.1016/0749-596X(90)90001-G
[41] Payne, John and Rodney D. Huddleston (2002) 'Nouns and noun phrases'. In: Huddleston, Rodney D. and Geoffrey K. Pullum (eds.) The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 323–523.
[42] Plag, Ingo (1999) Morphological Productivity: Structural Constraints in English Derivation. Berlin and New York, NY: Mouton de Gruyter.
[43] Plag, Ingo, Gero Kunter, Sabine Lappe and Maria Braun (2008) 'The role of semantics, argument structure and lexicalization in compound stress assignment in English'. Language 84, 760–794. | DOI 10.1353/lan.0.0072
[44] Rosenbach, Anette (2006) 'Descriptive genitives in English: a case study on constructional gradience'. English Language and Linguistics 10, 77–118. | DOI 10.1017/S1360674306001894
[45] Rosenbach, Anette (2007) 'Emerging variation: determiner genitives and noun modifiers in English'. English Language and Linguistics 11, 143–189. | DOI 10.1017/S1360674306002140
[46] Scott, Mike (2004) Oxford Wordsmith Tools, version 4.0.0.376. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/version4/index.htm. Accessed 25 April 2009.
[47] Selkirk, Elisabeth O. (1982) The Syntax of Words. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.
[48] Shimamura, Reiko (1998) 'Lexicalization of syntactic phrases: the case of genitive compounds like woman's magazine'. http://coe-sun.kuis.ac.jp/coe/public/paper/outside/shimamura2.pdf. Accessed 24 February 2010.
[49] Soegaard, Anders (2005) 'Compounding theories and linguistic diversity'. In: Frajzyngier, Zygmunt, Adam Hodges and David S. Rood (eds.) Linguistic Diversity and Language Theories. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 319–337.
[50] Štekauer, Pavol (2000) English Word-Formation. A History of Research (1960–1995). Tübingen: Gunter Narr.
[51] Štekauer, Pavol (2005) Meaning Predictability in Word-Formation: Novel, Context-Free Naming Units. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
[52] Štekauer, Pavol (2009) 'Meaning predictability of novel context-free compounds'. In: Lieber, Rochelle and Pavol Štekauer (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Compounding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 272–297.
[53] ten Hacken, Pius (2009) 'Early generative approaches'. In: Lieber, Rochelle and Pavol Štekauer (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Compounding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 54–77.
[54] Warren, Beatrice (1978) Semantic Patterns of Noun-Noun Compounds. Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis: Göteborg.
[55] Wisniewski, Edward J. and Gregory L. Murphy (2005) 'Frequency of relation type as a determinant of conceptual combination: A reanalysis'. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 31,169–174.
[56] Zimmer, Karl E. (1971) 'Some general observations about nominal compounds'. Working Papers on Language Universals 5, 1–21.
[57] Zimmer, Karl E. (1972) 'Appropriateness conditions for nominal compounds'. Working Papers on Language Universals 8, 3–20.