Headedness in Word Formation and Lexical Semantics: Evidence from Italiot and Cypriot (University of Patras, 2014)

Abstract

In this contribution, I offer a summary of my 2014 Ph.D. dissertation from the University of Patras on headedness in word formation and lexical semantics.

Semantics of Complex Words

“…As argued for by Ralli (2005Ralli ( , 2007Ralli ( , 2013, Andreou (2010Andreou ( , 2014, and Ralli and Andreou (2012), Greek exocentric compounds have a head inside their word limits, which gives them the basic category, meaning, and morphosyntactic features, but this head lies outside the confines of the structure involving the combination of two lexemes. The head is a derivational suffix, which is added at the periphery of this combination, and before the completion of the compound word with the addition of a closing inflectional ending.…”

“…In more detail, we argued that the nominal endocentric voÃıokiliá 'ox-belly' can be used metonymically to denote 'one with a big belly'. On the contrary, the adjectival exocentric voÃıokílis 'one with a big belly' which has the same meaning as voÃıokiliá, when the latter is used metonymically, exhibits properties, such as its adjectival use, which do not derive from metonymy (see Andreou 2014). It should be noted that Booij (2007: 80) also draws our attention to the fact that the Latin bahuvrihis auri-com-us 'having golden hair' and magn-anim-us 'magnanimous' (Oniga 1992) cannot be accounted for in terms of metonymy since they are adjectives.…”

“…As shown by Andreou (2014), depending on the stage one takes into consideration, a number of different adjectival suffixes can appear in Greek bahuvrihi compounds. In Ancient Greek, for example, adjectival bahuvrihis were productively built with the use of the suffix -i-, while -at-was used in bahuvrihis of Medieval Greek (Table 17).…”

“…A review of the relevant literature (see among others Bloomfield 1933;Bauer , 2008Melloni and Bisetto 2010;Ralli and Andreou 2012;Ralli 2013;Andreou 2014) shows that an open question is the relation between the terms bahuvrihi, possessive and exocentric compound. Consider the following:…”

Lexical negation in lexical semantics: the prefixes in- and dis-

“…A detailed discussion and analysis of the body of verbs in this framework, however, is still a desideratum(Lieber 2004: 72). For a treatment of evaluative morphology in nominals seeAndreou (2014Andreou ( , 2015.…”