The verbal structure in English synthetic compounds

Abstract

The question whether synthetic compounds should be analyzed as including a verbal core or as root compounds has issued a long theoretical debate in the linguistic literature since the ‘70s. It is precisely their mixed properties that make this debate so difficult to settle. We investigate compounds headed by suffix-based deverbal nouns and propose that they are ambiguous between true synthetic compounds, which include verbal structure, and root compounds. We trace this ambiguity back to Grimshaw’s (1990) distinction between argument structure nominals (realizing verbal arguments) and result or simple event nominals (which do not realize verbal arguments). The true synthetic compounds are headed by argument structure nominals and realize the verb’s internal argument as a non-head (e.g. book reading, book reader), but deverbal nouns may also head root compounds when interpreted as simple event or result nominals and realize a modifier as their non-head (e.g. police questioning). We account for the differences and similarities between synthetic compounds and argument structure nominals in the framework of Distributed Morphology and show how Voice-related properties account for further characteristics of synthetic compounds concerning event implication and accommodation of idioms.