Compounding

4 Key excerpts on "Compounding"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics

  • José Ignacio Hualde, Antxon Olarrea, Erin O'Rourke, José Ignacio Hualde, Antxon Olarrea, Erin O'Rourke(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  We may define Compounding as a word-formation process by which two or more lexemes combine to constitute a complex word, which is a lexical unit from a semantic, phonological, and functional point of view. For instance, the noun lexeme pel - ‘hair’ followed by the linking element - i - and the adjective lexeme roj - ‘red’ combine to form the adjective compound pelirrojo ‘red-haired.’ By lexeme, we understand here not only uninflected forms of independent words, as the stems pel - and roj - of the example above, but also the so-called learned stems of Greco-Latin origin. In fact, all Romance languages have continued to produce “neoclassical compounds” by means of these components, combined either among themselves (logopeda ‘speech therapist’) or combined with an actual word of the language (panamericanismo ‘Pan-Americanism’). Compounding by means of Greco-Latin stems is special in respect to its constitution. When two of these constituents combine together, the origin of the second one determines the kind of linking vowel appearing between them: if the second stem is of Greek origin, the linking vowel is usually - o - (mare-ó-grafo ‘tide-graph’); if the second constituent is of Latin origin, the linking vowel is in general - i - (gran-í-voro ‘grain-eater’). Another peculiarity of this kind of Compounding is that with A compounds denoting nationalities, the last adjective appears in its native form and the rest of the adjectives in their learned or Latin form: hispanofrancés ‘Hispanic-French’/ francoespañol ‘French-Spanish.’ The lexical categories that enter into Compounding are the major ones: V, N, and A. There are also a few cases where Adv(erb) appears as a compound constituent, either modifying a verb (malvender ‘to sell off cheap,’ malgastar ‘to waste’) or a deverbal adjective (bienhablado ‘well-spoken,’ malnacido ‘badly-born’ = ‘obnoxious’)

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  eBook - ePub

  A Typological Approach to Grammaticalization and Lexicalization

  East Meets West

  • Janet Zhiqun Xing, Janet Zhiqun Xing(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Regarding the definition of compound, there seems to be no consensus among scholars. Just as Lieber and Stekauer (2009: 6) claim, in spite of extensive research into compounds and Compounding processes, there are hardly any universally accepted criteria for determining what a compound is. The reasons why it is difficult to come up with a satisfying and universally applicable ­definition for compound, as Lieber and Stekauer (2009: 4) identify, are twofold. Firstly, the ­elements that make up compounds in some languages are not free-standing words, but rather stems or roots. Secondly, it is not always easy to make a clean distinction between compounds on the one hand and derived words or phrases on the other.

  The criteria for distinguishing between a syntactic construction and a compound are not well established. Possible criteria proposed so far include phonological (stress, vowel harmony, the sandhi process, tonal pattern s, vowel deletion or reduction, etc.), morphological (the behavior of the compound with respect to inflection, presence of linking elements or special formatives, the loss of syntactic dependency markers, special constituent order), syntactic (syntactic impenetrability, inseparability, and inalterability), semantic (non-compositionality, degree of lexicalization or listedness in the lexicon), and orthographic (written as a single orthographic word).1 None of these are foolproof or cross-linguistically applicable but language-specific.

  The study of compounds involves many aspects and issues, including, but not limited to, headedness, exocentricity, productivity, the lexical category of the constituents (and the whole compound as well). The grammatical and semantic relationships of the constituents, and thus the classification of the whole compound, along with the relationship between Compounding and other morphosyntactic phenomena such as incorporation, serial verbs, phrasal verbs, and the like complicate their study as well.

  As a type of word formation, the process of Compounding, as revealed by some recent studies such as Lehmann (2002) , Packard (2004) , Brinton and Traugott (2005) , Lightfoot (2011) , Wischer (2011)

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  eBook - ePub

  The Canadian Style

  A Guide to Writing and Editing

  • Public Works and Government Services Canada Translation Bureau, Dundurn Press Limited(Authors)
  • 1997(Publication Date)
  • Dundurn Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Two

  Hyphenation: Compounding and word division

  2.01 Introduction

  2.02 Compound nouns and nouns in compounds

  2.03 Nouns with adjectives and participles

  2.04 Compound adjectives; adjectives and participles in compounds

  2.05 Verbs

  2.06 Adverbs in compounds

  2.07 Prefixes

  2.08 Any, every. no and some

  2.09 Suffixes

  2.10 Numerals and units of measurement

  2.11 Fractions

  2.12 The suspended compound

  2.13 Points of the compass

  2.14 Titles of office

  2.15 Numerals and single letters

  2.16 Plurals of compound terms

  2.17 Word division

  2

  Hyphenation: Compounding and Word Division

  2.01 Introduction

  A compound term is a combination of two or more words that, to varying degrees, have become unified in form and meaning through frequent use together. In many cases only one syllable in the compound is stressed. The trend over the years has been for the English compound to begin as two separate words, then be hyphenated and finally, if there is no structural impediment to union, become a single word written without a space or hyphen. Whatever its form, the compound frequently serves to avoid circumlocution and create a more concise style.

  The existence of three different forms for compounds leads to considerable instability and variation in their presentation, and hyphenation has become one of the most controversial points of editorial style. Dictionaries vary widely in the forms they choose for specific compounds: “hot-line” in the Gage Canadian Dictionary, “hot line” in the Canadian Dictionary of the English Language and “hotline” in The Concise Oxford Dictionary, for example.

  All authorities agree that the matter of hyphenation is one where the exercise of individual judgment is required, and the rules that follow are not intended to preclude its use. Where various authorities disagree, it is desirable to err on the side of caution and recommend use of the hyphen for the sake of clarity.

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  eBook - ePub

  Second Language Processing

  An Introduction

  • Nan Jiang(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Processing Complex Words, Multiword Units, and Meanings in L2

  5.1 Introduction

  The study of L2 word recognition reviewed in Chapter 4 deals with words as individual whole units. L2 lexical processing research has also considered the processing of complex words and multiword units such as formulas and col-locations. Complex words are words with more than one morpheme. Three types of complex words are usually distinguished: inflected, derivational, and compound words, such as walked , unhappy , and classroom . They differ in how morphemes are combined in their creation. The inflectional and derivational words are created by adding inflectional and derivational affixes to a root, and a compound is made of two free morphemes. Several types of multiword units can be distinguished as well even though they are not always clearly defined and differentiated in the literature. They may include formulaic expressions (or simply formulas) such as on the other hand , lexical bundles such as the end of the , collocations such as on foot and by car , and idioms such as beat around the bush .

  Investigations into these lexical units have attempted to answer a common research question: are they represented holistically or in a decomposed way? For example, is the word unhappy stored in our lexicon as a single unit or as two units, i.e., un and happy ? Similarly, is the expression on the other hand stored as a whole unit or as four individual words? Other questions have also been explored such as how L2 proficiency, semantic transparency (i.e., whether the meaning of a compound is the combined meanings of its two component words, e.g., classroom being transparent and honeymoon being opaque), cross-linguistic congruency (i.e., whether an L2 collocation has a counterpart in L1) affect their representation and processing.

  Furthermore, lexical processing research has examined how lexical meaning is represented and processed in an L2. This research has examined primarily two questions: to what extent L2 learners are able to develop L2-specific semantic structures rather than continue to rely on their L1 semantic system, and whether the processing of meaning in L1 and L2 is subserved by the same or different neural substrates. The processing of compounds, multiword units, and lexical meanings are the focus of this chapter.

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