Compounds and word trees
LING 481/581
Winter 2011
Organization
Compounds
heads
types of compounds
Word trees
Compounding
[root] [root]
machine gun
land line
snail mail
top-heavy
fieldwork
Notice variability in punctuation (to ignore)
Compound stress
Green Lake
bluebird
fast lane
Bigfoot
bad boy
old school
hotline
Myspace
Compositionality
(Extent to which) meanings of words,
phrases determined by
morpheme meaning
structure
Predictability of meaning in compounds
roid rage (< 1987; road rage < 1988)
football (< 1486; American football 1879)
soap opera (< 1939)
Head
A word in a syntactic construction or a
morpheme in a morphological one that
determines the grammatical function or
meaning of the construction as a whole. For
example, house is the head of the noun
phrase the red house... Aronoff and Fudeman
2011
Righthand head rule
In English (and most languages),
morphological heads are the rightmost noninflectional morpheme in the word
Lexical category of entire compound = lexical
category of rightmost member
Not Spanish (HS example p. 139)
English be devil, bedevil
Compounding and lexical category
noun
verb
noun
machine
gun
verb
thinktank
friend request skin-deep
foot bail
rage quit
stir-fry(?)
?
adjective
high school
dry-clean(?)
low-ball
adjective
red-hot
the V+N pattern is unproductive and limited to a few lexically listed items, and the N+V
pattern is not really productive either. HS: 138
Heads of words
Morphosyntactic head: determines lexical category
syntactic distribution
That thinktank is overrated.
morphological characteristics; e.g. inflection
plurality: highschool highschools
tense on V: dry-clean dry-cleaned
case on N
Sahaptin
wyxti- run, race
wayxtitpam pertaining to racing
wayxtitpam k'si race horse
Mytski=ish -shapaxwnawiinknik-xa-na wayxtitpam k'si-nan...
morning=I 3s.obv-lunge-hab-past
race
horse-acc
In the morning, I used to lunge race horses...
semantic head:
the whole compound is a hyponym of the head
highschool is a kind of school
tray table
a kind of table
Canadian English: table tray
a kind of tray
What is the semantic head of each?
blackbird, girlfriend, White House, looking
glass, African-American, easy-going,
download, kill-joy, whitewater rafting club
member, laptop, scuttlebutt, game-changer,
highrise
A blackbird is a type of ___
Usually, semantic and morphosyntactic heads
are the same
Types of compound (based on semantic
headedness)
Endocentric compounds
An endocentric compound is one that has a
head. The head expresses the core meaning of
the compound, and it belongs to the same lexical
category as the compound as a whole. Aronoff
and Fudeman 2011
HS: the term endocentric means that the
semantic head...is inside (endo-) the compound
textbook, caveman, mail-carrier, download, stircrazy
Exocentric compounds
HS: their semantic head is outside (exo-) the compound
swansong
not a type of song; a final/farewell performance
highbrow
not a type of brow; fancy; of high society
four-eyes
not a type of eye(s); a person who has four eyes; i.e. wears glasses
hothead
a person whose head is hot, prone to anger
red-hot
a type of candy
the low-down
the fundamental information; a summary of the news
a put-down
an insult; a negative remark
Some exocentric compounds
noun
noun
swansong
adjective
highbrow
hothead
four-eyes
num
adjective
red-hot
Coordinative compounds
HS: compounds that have more than one semantic head.
In these compounds, each member has a separate referent.
Both members are on an equal footing, and they can be
paraphrased with and
a father-daughter event
and in some form in the compound (if these are
compounds)
ps-&-qs
odds-n-ends
bread-n-butter
HS: Coordinative compounds are widespread in the
worlds languages, but they happen to be rare in European
languages, including English
Coordinative compounds
Korean
Appositional compounds
both compound members have the same referent
very difficult to distinguish from endocentric, where
compound narrows reference of head
HS example: student worker
a type of worker
but also a type of student
Other possible examples
apeman (vs. caveman)
hunter-gatherer (vs. blueberry gatherer)
student-teacher (vs. history teacher)
singer-songwriter (vs. country songwriter)
blue-green (green(*ish)-blue), red-orange (vs. orange-red?)
Headedness and MS features
HS 143: The formal head of a compound is thus the
morphosyntactic locus of the compound, in that it is the
place where the morphosyntactic features of the
compound are expressed.
Spanish ao luz light year, pl. aos luz
lipstick, pl. lipsticks: lip + sticks
Compounds that are not semantically endocentric do not
necessarily behave like formally headed compounds.
Spanish coordinative compound actor-bailarin actor-dancer, pl.
actores-bailarines
English exocentric compound sabertooth, pl. sabertooths,
*saberteeth
Plural marking inside endocentric
compounds
my skates
my ____ bag
my glasses
my ___ case
whats the difference?
glasses and other nouns are pluralia tantum (inherently plural)
Affixes as heads of derived words
Derived lexemes may be said to be headed by
their category-changing affixes, which
determine the overall word-class and the
inflections
Words and tree structures
learn
[ln]
learnable
[lnbl ]
learnability [lnbli]
Another use for word tree structures
Represent ambiguity
ambiguous = having more than one meaning
Sources of ambiguity in words
different meanings of same morpheme
hard solid, difficult
homophonous morphemes
bank
structure
more than one of above
An ambiguous headline
HERSHEY BARS PROTEST
[Hershey bars] protest
Hershey [bars protest]
An ambiguous word: unfoldable
block of wood:
not capable of being folded
un- negative:
Adj[___Adj[
origami figure:
capable of being unfolded
un- reverse: V[___V[
(proposed) Athabaskan verb structure
Rice, Keren (2000)
Morpheme order and
semantic scope. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Compounds in Mandarin Chinese
Mandarinvery little affixation
-// little (diminutive) (also means son)
Some compounds
[w hjw]
net ball
tennis
[kwn j]
manage house
housekeeper
are any exocentric?
Czech
endocentric, exocentric, coordinative, or appositional compounds?
Czech
literal translation
spolu-pra:ce
together-work
cooperation
lido-jed
human-eat
cannibal
pozoru-hodni
attention-worthy
remarkable
vrtji-xvost
wag-tail
fidgety
vjetro-plax
wind-chase
unreliable person
straS-pitel
scare-bag
cowardly person
kafe-brawn-do-zelena
coffee-brown-in-green khaki color
sem-tam
here-there
both ways
volki-nevolki
willing-not.willing
willy-nilly
Siroko-daleko
wide-far
at a distance
