Abstract
Competition in morphology is generally viewed as a relation holding between words or word formation processes. This article, framed within Construction Morphology, explores another type of competition which is still largely neglected, namely the competition between morphological words (i.e., simple, derived and compound words) and multiword expressions. It shows that competition is at work between these two types of constructions and that it may lead to bidirectional blocking, thus suggesting a view of the mental lexicon where both words and multiword expressions are stored on a par with each other. Competition at different levels of abstraction (specific lexical items vs. patterns of formation) and along different dimensions (synchronic vs. diachronic) is also discussed. Two case-studies from Italian are offered that explore the synchronic competition between (i) the simile construction with color adjectives (rosso come il fuoco ‘red as the fire’) vs. the corresponding compound pattern (rosso fuoco ‘fire-like red’) and (ii) irreversible binomials (sano e salvo ‘safe and sound’) vs. coordinate compounds of the sordomuto ‘deaf-mute’ type. The findings show that even when competition occurs between specific lexical items belonging to different patterns, there is often differentiation at the more abstract level, with different patterns specializing for different functions, as a result of the struggle for existence theorized by Aronoff (Competition and the lexicon. In: Elia A, Iacobini C, Voghera M (eds) Livelli di analisi e fenomeni di interfaccia. Bulzoni, Roma, pp 39–52, 2016, Competitors and alternants in linguistic morphology. In: Rainer F, Gardani F, Dressler WU, Luschützky HC (eds) Competition in inflection and word-formation. Springer, Cham, pp 39–66, 2019).
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Notes
- 1.
The literature on idioms and collocations is far too large to be even partially acknowledged here; the references are given by way of example.
- 2.
Here and in the rest of the paper I follow the notation for schemas introduced by Masini and Audring (2019). In brief: (i) capital letter subscripts such as <A>, <V>, <N>, etc. stand for lexical categories; (ii) lower case subscripts <i>, <j>, and <k> for indices; (iii) Greek letter subscripts <α>, <β>, and <γ> for features; (iv) non-subscript letters <x>, <y>, and <z> for variables, whereby lower case letters (<x, y, z>) stand for unspecified phonological material and capital letters (<X, Y, Z>) for an unspecified lexical category. Specified phonological structure within constructions is rendered informally in italics (dog, -er) or in phonemic transcription (/dɔg/, /ər/), whereas semantic denotations and operators are in capital letters (e.g. NOT for negation).
- 3.
These items have been named in many different ways in the literature, including, for instance, “phrasal compounds” or “prepositional compounds” (Delfitto and Melloni 2009; Rio-Torto and Ribeiro 2009), and “improper compounds” (Rainer and Varela 1992). The distinction between these phrasal lexemes and compounds is not always trivial. Several works, however, have argued in favor of keeping this distinction (see e.g. Booij 2009 on Dutch and Modern Greek; Ralli and Stavrou 1998 on Modern Greek; Masini and Scalise 2012 on Italian; Masini and Benigni 2012 on Russian; Schlücker and Hüning 2009 and Hüning 2010 on German; Rainer and Varela 1992 on Spanish), which is also assumed here.
- 4.
- 5.
Needless to say, this regards the use of the day after today as a possible (conventionalized) name for the ‘tomorrow’ meaning (all nuances being equal). It might, of course, be used as a (non-conventionalized) phrase to refer to the day that comes after today, for whatever (e.g. pragmatic) reason. As Bauer (1983: 88) puts it, “blocking prevents not so much the coining of nonce complex forms as their institutionalization”.
- 6.
The symbol ° used in (3e) and below stands for ‘possible but non-existent word’.
- 7.
Not all capo + N compounds in Italian have this semantics: some mean ‘chief N’, such as caporedattore (head+editor) ‘editor in chief’. The latter type of compounds may sometimes appear with reverse order (redattore capo), and unchanged semantics, whereas this is impossible with the cases being discussed in (4).
- 8.
Possible compounds like (11a–c) might be dispreferred (thus favoring the emergence of the corresponding NPN expressions) also due to phonological reasons, since “VN compounds show a massive preference for bisyllabic verb bases” (Ricca 2009: 244). However, we also have NPN fixed expressions where the underlying verb is bisyllabic, like (12d) or portatore di handicap (bringer of handicap) ‘disabled person’, which prevents °portahandicap. Other factors may be involved (e.g. register) that would deserve a more detailed investigation.
- 9.
- 10.
Examples are: fare / mettere ansia (make / put anxiety) ‘to cause anxiety’; fare / mettere paura (make / put fear) ‘to scare’; fare / mettere spavento (make / put fear) ‘to frighten’. A search on the Italian Web 2010 (itTenTen10) corpus (a web corpus of approx. 2,5 billion words searched through the Sketch Engine: https://www.sketchengine.co.uk/), however, reveals a significant preference for one form over the other in all cases: fare ansia (8 occurrences) vs. mettere ansia (380 occurrences); fare paura (16,615 occurrences) vs. mettere paura (1884 occurrences); fare spavento (467 occurrences) vs. mettere spavento (26 occurrences).
- 11.
Again, the data for the analysis are taken from the Italian Web 2010 (itTenTen10) corpus, cf. footnote 10.
- 12.
For instance: (i) nero ‘black’ frequently occurs with pece ‘pitch’, notte ‘night’, carbone ‘coal’, inchiostro ‘ink’ or petrolio ‘oil’ in both constructions (vs. e.g. morte ‘death’, which selects only one construction: nero come la morte lit. black like the death ‘intense black’); (ii) bianco ‘white’ frequently occurs with latte ‘milk’, avorio ‘ivory’, marmo ‘marble’, snow ‘neve’, carta ‘paper’ or cadavere ‘corpse’ in both constructions (vs. cencio ‘rag’ or crema ‘cream’, which select only one construction each: bianco come un cencio lit. white as a rag ‘very pale’, bianco crema lit. white cream ‘cream-like white’); (iii) verde ‘green’ frequently occurs with prato ‘lawn’, acqua ‘water’, bosco ‘forest’, speranza ‘hope’, foglia ‘leaf’, mare ‘sea’ or erba ‘grass’ in both constructions (vs. e.g. bottiglia ‘bottle’, which occurs only in verde bottiglia lit. green bottle ‘bottle-like green’); (iv) azzurro ‘(light) blue’ frequently occurs with cielo ‘sky’, mare ‘sea’ and ghiaccio ‘ice’ in both constructions (vs. polvere ‘dust’, which appears only in azzurro polvere lit. light_blue dust ‘dust-like light_blue’).
- 13.
The association with an entity (N) that is regarded as a prototypical example of the property conveyed by A might actually be at the basis of the intensification meaning conveyed by the more general [A come NP] construction in (33).
- 14.
Simile is part of figurative language, which is generally thought of as conveying vividness and intensity (cf. e.g. Ortony 1975 on metaphors). Also, recent experimental evidence seems to suggest that figurative expressions are more emotionally engaging than literal expressions (Citron and Goldberg 2014; cf. also Citron et al. 2016).
- 15.
Although D’Achille and Grossmann (2013) observed some variation in corpora.
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Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Mark Aronoff, Claudio Iacobini and Anna M. Thornton for valuable comments on a previous version of this work. I also wish to thank the audience at IMM17 (Vienna, 18-21 February 2016), Franz Rainer and an anonymous reviewer for their very useful remarks. The usual disclaimers apply.
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Masini, F. (2019). Competition Between Morphological Words and Multiword Expressions. In: Rainer, F., Gardani, F., Dressler, W., Luschützky, H. (eds) Competition in Inflection and Word-Formation . Studies in Morphology, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02550-2_11
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