The Morphosemantic Transparency/Opacity of Novel English Analogical Compounds and Compound Families

Abstract

This study deals with novel English analogical compounds, i.e. compounds obtained via either a unique model (e.g. beefcake after cheesecake) or a schema model: e.g., green-collar based on white-collar, blue-collar, pink-collar, and other X-collar compounds. The study aims, first, to inspect whether novel analogical compounds maintain the same degree of morphosemantic transparency/opacity as their models, and, second, to find out the role played by the compound constituents in the constitution of compound families, such as X-collar and others. To these aims, the study proposes a scale of morphosemantic transparency/opacity for the analysis of compound constituents. In particular, the compound constituents in our database (115 examples) are analysed in connection with: 1) their degree of transparency (vs. opacity, including metaphorical/metonymic meaning), linked to their semantic contribution in the construction of the whole compound’s meaning, and 2) their part-of-speech. Against the common assumption that productive word-formation rules mostly create morphosemantically transparent new words, or that rule productivity is closely connected with transparency, the study of our database demonstrates that novel analogical compounds tend to maintain the same transparency/opacity degree as their models. It also shows that, in nuclear families and subfamilies of compounds, the part-of-speech of the constituents, their degree of transparency/opacity, and their semantic relation are reproduced in all members of the analogical set.

Remarks on the semantics and paradigmaticity of NN compounds

“…This argument has been illustrated by way of Levi (1978), but other meaning catalogues are expected to exhibit similar kinds of macro-regions. The nature of such regions takes us back to the unresolved relation between granularity levels in word-formation semantics, metonymy and lexical semantics, which is the focus of a number of works, recent and in the pipeline (Bagasheva, 2014;Bourque, 2014: 147-216;Mattiello & Dressler, 2018;Pepper, forthcoming).…”

“…[ X ℜ Y ]Z Numerous models have been devised which comprise the whole variety of meaning relationships between the head and the modifier 1 . The scope, motivation and purpose of such proposals are diverse, and they range from early models (Bloomfield, 1933;Hatcher, 1960;Jespersen, 1942), to works with a transformational background (Allen, 1978;Levi, 1978;Selkirk, 1982), meaning-oriented approaches (Downing, 1977;Jackendoff, 2009Jackendoff, , 2016Lieber, 2004;Štekauer, 2009, and recent miscellaneous proposals (Bourque, 2014;Mattiello & Dressler, 2018;Pepper, forthcoming;Schäfer, 2018). The study of compound semantics initially targeted heads (Allen, 1978;Hatcher, 1960;Jespersen, 1942), although it has gradually redefined the role of modifiers, thus disclosing their decisive effect on the meaning of the compound (Baayen, 2010;Breban & Kolkmann, 2019;Levin, Glass, & Jurafsky, 2019;Štekauer, 2016;Warren, 1984).…”

The representation and processing of compounds words

“…This is most often followed by children's creative formation of novel words, such as Danish bamse+hund 'teddy bear dog', hunde+mann 'dog man' (both produced at age 2;4, Kjaerbaek and Basbøll 2017). All such neologisms produced by children are morphosemantically transparent, which is not the case for adults (Mattiello and Dressler 2018), who often form new morphosemantically opaque compounds by analogy to already existing morphosemantically opaque compounds as in babymoon created in analogy to honeymoon. This difference points to a view in which compounding may begin with spontaneous productivity from which later analogical patterns develop.…”

“…In Libben (1998Libben ( , 2010, this approach was used to create the following 2 X 2 classification for bi-constituent compounds: transparent-transparent, opaque-transparent, transparent-opaque, opaque-opaque. A still finer gradation has been proposed by Mattiello and Dressler (2018).…”

Communication with diminutives to young children vs. pets in German, Italian, Lithuanian, Russian, and English

“…Our view on morphosemantic transparency/opacity has been developed from Dressler (1985), to Dressler et al (2016), Ransmayr et al (2016) and Mattiello & Dressler (2019), cf. Talamo et al (2016), resulting in models of grading morphosemantic transparency/opacity in various degrees of fineness.…”