Abstract
N + N compounds in Italian as well as in other Romance languages are differently judged in the current literature. Most scholars agree that only a subset should be treated as true compounds, while the rest is mostly rejected. However, it is not clear what the right criteria are for assessing their status as compounds or as syntactic units. In this paper, an entirely morphological approach will be advocated, which benefits from a careful distinction of two different senses of the term lexicon: the Bloomfieldian sense of the lexicon intended as a repository, the Lexicon1 and the morphological lexicon intended as the set of potential (regularly derived or compounded) lexemes of a language, the Lexicon2. The consistently morphological approach will help us shed light on the intricate issue of Romance compounding invoking general principles for keeping what results from a syntactic pattern and is likely to be a more or less entrenched unit, i.e. a Lex1-lexeme, and what is likely to be produced by an abstract morphological pattern, i.e. a Lex2-lexeme.
Parts of this paper were presented at the 15th International Morphology Meeting (Vienna 9.-12.2.2012) and at the Workshop “Das Wort als Einheit: Grundlagen und Grenzfälle”, held during the XXXIII Deutscher Romanistentag (Würzburg 22.-25.9.2013). I thank all people present on these occasions as well as two anonymous reviewers for valuable suggestions and remarks. Needless to say, I am solely responsible for views expressed and mistakes.
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Notes
- 1.
I thank one anonymous reviewer for pointing out this to me.
- 2.
The type (1c) will be contrasted with the so-called identificational type in Sect. 4 below.
- 3.
[Compounding has developed out of the syntactic combination of several words]. This statement must be understood in a genetic perspective, as Paul himself clarifies immediately thereafter: “Dies ist nicht so zu verstehen, daß jedes einzelne Wort, das wir als Zusammensetzung betrachten, so entstanden wäre, vielmehr, nachdem eine Anzahl syntaktischer Verbindungen zu einer Worteinheit verschmolzen waren, wirkten dieselben als Zusammensetzungen, nicht mehr als syntaktische Verbindungen, analogisch weiter” [This is not to be understood as if every single word that we regard as a compound came into being in this way, but rather after a certain number of syntactic combinations were fused into a word unit the latter – not felt any longer as syntactic combinations – acted analogically as compounds upon further words]. This view of the genesis of compounding was well established in the diachronically oriented paradigm of the nineteenth century linguistics (cf. Kastovsky 2009). It is interesting to observe that this view is perfectly compatible with the current constructional paradigm which regards abstract patterns as emergent from the entrenchment of concrete chunks (cf. Gaeta 2008 for a discussion).
- 4.
See in this regard Scalise and Guevara (2005: 147): “The term Lexicalism refers to the theoretical standpoint in modern generative linguistics according to which the processes that form complex words (derivation and compounding) are accounted for by a set of Lexical Rules, independent of and different from the syntactic rules of the grammar (i.e. word formation is not performed by syntactic transformations). Such Lexical Rules are assumed to operate in a presyntactic component, the Lexicon”.
- 5.
Incidentally, this is also the null hypothesis more or less explicitly assumed in gammaticalization studies, whereby affixes go back to the grammaticalization of earlier lexemes repeatedly occurring in certain syntactic environments (cf. Hopper and Traugott 2003: 100). Therefore, it is not only compounding which genetically results from the univerbation of syntactic combinations, but it is more in general morphology which comes to being from the routinization of earlier syntactic combinations.
- 6.
Other criteria listed by Lieber and Štekauer (2009) focus on phonological (presence of a specific stress pattern) and morphological (presence of linking elements) properties which will be discussed in Sect. 3. Finally, I fully agree upon the scarce role played by spelling as also pointed out by the authors.
- 7.
Cf. Corbin (1997: 59): “[L]a morphologie a davantage vocation à construire des unités lexicales que les autres composants de la grammaire … Mais … ses produits ne sont pas automatiquement lexicalisés” [Morphology has more vocation to build lexical units than the other components of grammar. But its products are not automatically lexicalized].
- 8.
The model of Construction Morphology as elaborated by Booij (2010) can be surely adopted to represent the views expressed here. However, I find this model not entirely satisfactory because of the lack of a clear distinction between Lex1 and Lex2, as is shown by the interpretation provided for the Lexical Integrity Principle which assumes as is known that “[t]he syntax neither manipulates nor has access to the internal structure of words” (Booij 2010: 99). In this regard, Booij (2009: 97) observes that “[t]he main reason why we consider a sequence of morphemes a word is that that sequence behaves as a cohesive unit with respect to syntactic processes. In other words, cohesiveness is the defining criterion for canonical wordhood, whereas other properties such as being a listeme (a conventional expression) are clearly not to be seen as defining properties for wordhood. Hence, if we take the notion word seriously, we might say that its defining property is cohesiveness or non-interruptability”. However, this alleged divide line between syntactic and morphological constructions consisting in the property of cohesiveness has been shown in Sect. 2 above to be unreliable for distinguishing between Lex1- and Lex2-lexemes.
- 9.
Other cases like camposanto ‘cemetery, lit. field-holy’ occur which displays only a final plural marking camposanti / *campisanti, but this seems rather to be due to a general process which also concerns former syntactic units like pomo d’oro ‘tomato, lit. apple of gold’ / pl. pomi d’oro undergoing a process of univerbation: pomodoro / pomodori. Thus, this process of externalization of inflection seems to generally characterize Lex1-lexemes.
- 10.
On the other hand, the process of externalization of inflection can also affect single compounds testifying of their acquired Lex1-status, as for instance capostazione ‘station master’/capostazioni besides capistazione. As is typical with Lex1, the occurrence of this process is not foreseeable a priori, as shown by other compounds like capo partito ‘party leader’/capi partito/*capopartiti, etc. (see Gaeta and Ricca 2009 for more details).
- 11.
For brevity, I will not discuss Scalise and Bisetto’s (2009) further categorization of these types.
- 12.
The logic of this argument is not entirely clear to me because metaphoric meanings also play an important role in many syntactic environments. For instance, in Italian as well as in other Romance languages an adjective can precede a noun only if it allows a metaphoric interpretation: un amaro caffé ‘a bitter coffee’ vs. un caffé amaro ‘a coffee without sugar’, but *un ghiacciato caffé vs. un caffé ghiacciato ‘an ice-cold coffee’.
- 13.
Notice that the filter can be overcome insofar as the Lex1-lexeme is more stabilized: for instance, in the case of the univerbation pomodoro seen above the filter is completely switched off giving rise to derivatives like pomodor-ino ‘tomato-dim’. Moreover, the Filter-Principle can also be overcome any time a particularly expressive Lex1-lexeme enters a lexeme formation pattern, as shown for instance by the derivative celodurista ‘male chauvinist’, which is based on the fully specified idiom Ce l’ho duro! ‘I have a hard-on!, lit. I’ve got it hard’.
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Gaeta, L. (2015). Lexeme Formation in a Conscious Approach to the Lexicon. In: Bauer, L., Körtvélyessy, L., Štekauer, P. (eds) Semantics of Complex Words. Studies in Morphology, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14102-2_7
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