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Compound Adjectives in English View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive - Università di Pisa UNIVERSITÀ DI PISA DOTTORATO DI RICERCA IN LINGUISTICA GENERALE, STORICA, APPLICATA, COMPUTAZIONALE E D ELLE LINGUE M ODERNE (ITALIANO, INGLESE, FRANCESE, SPAGNOLO, TEDESCO) Cod. L-LIN/12 TESI DI DOTTORATO Compound Adjectives in English A descriptive approach to their morphology and functions PRESIDENTE DEL CORSO DI DOTTORATO Chiar.ma Prof. Giovanna Marotta TUTORI Chiar.ma Prof. Lavinia Merlini Barbaresi Chiar.mo Prof. Wolfgang Ulrich Dressler Chiar.mo Dott. Alessandro Lenci CANDIDATA SARA CONTI CICLO 2004-2006 The present Doctoral Dissertation is the result of a Joint-Supervision Agreement between the University of Pisa and the University of Vienna To my mother Acknowledgments I wish to thank my supervisors Prof. Lavinia Merlini Barbaresi, Prof. Wolfgang Ulrich Dressler and Dr. Alessandro Lenci for their constructive suggestions and for improving the text. I also would like to thank Prof. Eiji Yamada for generously providing interesting material, Prof. Annalisa Baicchi, Dr. Veronica Bonsignori for her precious friendship, Dr. Gloria Cappelli, Dr. Daniele Franceschi, Dr. Maria Ivana Lorenzetti, Dr. Silvia Masi, Dr. Elisa Mattiello for their moral support, and finally Maria Fantin for her compentent help. Last but not least, my gratitude to my family and Marcello for their love, their constant support and for helping me going through bad times. Table of Contents Introduction iv-vi Chapter I – Compounding 1 0. Introduction 1 1. What is compounding? Definitions and relevant characteristics 1 1.1 Binarity and recursivity 5 2. Headedness and main compound types 6 2.1. Endocentric and exocentric compounds 8 2.2 Subordinative and Coordinative compounds 10 3. Differences in classification 11 4. Brief overview of prototypical compounds 12 4.1 Compound nouns 13 4.2 Compound verbs 15 4.3 Compound adjectives 15 4.4. Compound adverbs 16 5. Other non-prototypical compounds 16 6. Compoundhood 17 6.1 Compounds as syntactic atoms 20 6.2 Syntactic tests 21 6.3 Semantic criteria 24 6.4 Phonological criteria 27 6.5 Conclusions 29 Chapter II – Compound Adjectives. An introduction33 0. Introduction 30 1. Literature on compound adjectives 30 1.1 Handbooks 30 1.2 Monographs 32 1.3 Articles and other contributions 41 1.4 Conclusions 50 Chapter III – Compound Adjectives. Classification and description 52 0. Introduction 52 1. Classification: an overview 53 2. Data: sources and methods 56 3. Subordinative compounds: endocentric N-Adj patterns 59 3.1 Grading compounds 59 3.1.1 Semantic transparency in colour compounds 61 3.1.2 Colour compounds in advertising 63 3.1.3 Intensifying compounds 65 3.1.3.1 Stone-adjective formations 68 3.1.3.2 Stock-adjective and similar formations 68 3. 2 Time & Space compounds 71 3.2.1 Noun-wide formations 73 i 3.3 Restrictive/specifying compounds 74 3.3.1 The -free pattern 79 3.3.2 The morphological status of second constituents 83 3.3.2.1 N -free formations 85 3.3.2.2 N-happy formations 87 4. Subordinative compounds: endocentric Adj-Adj patterns 89 4.1 Grading compounds 89 4.2 Derivational morphology and nuance identification 90 4.3 Intensifying adjectives 93 5. Exocentric compounds 94 5.1 V-N formations 94 5.2 The morphological status of long-legged and saucer-eyed 96 6. Copulative compounds 99 6.1 Antonymic and non-antonymic compounds 100 6.2 Semantic analysis of copulative compound adjectives in relation to the nominal head 102 6.2.1 Olsen’s study on copulative nominal compounds 102 6.3 Semantic patterns of copulative compound adjectives 103 6.3.1 Semantic patterns: the disambiguating role of the nominal head104 6.3 Constitutents’combinability 107 7. Borderline cases 109 7.1 Particle-N pattern 110 7.2 V-Particle pattern 113 7.3 Particle-V pattern 115 7.4 ADJ-N pattern 115 8. Participial compounds 116 8.1 Introduction 116 8.2 Participles and adjectives 116 8.3 Participial compound adjectives in previous works: a review 119 8.4 Synthetic vs. non-synthetic participial compounds 121 8.5 Synthetic compounds and argument structure 123 9. Conclusions 124 Chapter IV – Compound adjectives and adjectivehood 0. Introduction 125 1. Semantic and syntactic properties of adjectives 125 2. Prototypicality 127 3. Adjectivehood and compound adjectives 128 3.1 N-Adj endocentric compounds: Grading compounds 129 3.1.1 Colour compounds (nuancing) 129 3.1.2 Intensifying compounds 130 3.2 N-Time & Space compounds 130 ii 3.3 Restrictive/Specifying compounds 132 3.4 Adj-Adj endocentric compounds: nuancing and intensifying 134 3.5 Copulative compounds 134 3.5.1 Appositional compounds 135 3.5.2 Coordinative (and Complementary) compounds 136 3.6 Participial compounds 138 3.6.1 –ing PCAs 138 3.6.1.1 N-ing PCAs 139 3.6.1.2 Adj-ing PCAs 142 3.6.1.3 Self-ing PCAs 144 3.6.1.4 Adv-ing PCAs 146 3.6.2 –ed PCAs 149 3.6.2.1 N -ed PCAs 149 3.6.2.2 Self –ed PCAs 153 3.6.2.3 Adj –ed PCAs 155 3.6.2.4 Adv -ed PCAs 156 3.6.2.5 Conclusions 158 Appendix A 167 Appendix B 186 References 242 iii Introduction _______________________________________________________________________________ Introduction The topic of the present dissertation is the investigation of compound adjectives in English. The aim, declared in the subtitle, is to give a descriptive overview of this vast and much-neglected aspect of the English language. The Kaleidoscopic variety of this class of compounds, together with its vital productivity in Present English, particularly in written language, have provided the stimuli to the present analysis that aims at giving some deeper insight on this rich and living phenomenon, which is far from marginal in English, despite the little attention in has so far received. The approach chosen for this purpose is twofold, namely morphological and functional. The morphological perspective focuses on the identification of the combinatory patterns of compound adjectives, as well as on the morphological properties of the constituents. The functional view deals with the notion of adjectivehood, both in its semantic and syntactic implications, and points to analyse this notion applied to the class of compound adjectives. This study can be divided into three main parts. The first part (chapter I) concerns compounding in general, as the fundamental basis for any further analysis. The second part (chapter 2) consists of a general review of what is generally defined as the state of the art on compound adjectives. The third part (chapter 3 and 4) is devoted to the classification and to the morphological- functional analysis of the class of compound adjectives. Chapter I introduces the basic notion of compounding, starting from the definitions given by various scholars, and looks at its collocation within general morphology. The chapter proceeds to present the main properties of compounding, such as binarity, recursivity and headedness; the latter being crucial to the general classification of compounds. Successively, it is given a brief review of the various compound classes in English with reference to the notion of compound prototypicality and non-prototypicality. Finally, a section is devoted to the notion of compoundhood in relation and in contrast to syntax. Here, various criteria for compoundhood are introduced, starting from the well-known concept of syntactic atoms, passing through syntactic tests to semantic and phonological criteria. iv Introduction _______________________________________________________________________________ Chapter two is devoted to the literature on compound adjectives that stands out for its fragmentary and sporadic nature, which once more remarks the scarce attention devoted to this category, especially in recent years. The works are divided according to the type of publication, namely handbooks, monographs, articles and single contributions. Handbooks provide quick sketches of classifications, while articles generally focus on one specific pattern within the class. Monographs represent more exhaustive contributions, although they have the disadvantages of being quite outdated and orientated towards the sole transformational approach. Chapter three presents a proposal of classification for compound adjectives that relies on morphological and semantic criteria at the same time, which partially takes advantage of the previous classification proposed by Marchand, 1969. The data used for the classification and the observations is mainly drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC, henceforth), but also from other sources, which have provided useful information. Each subgroup identified is analysed in its semantic and morphological characteristics with reference to the notions of grammatical productivity and analogy. Particular attention has been devoted to restrictive/specifying compounds, as in fire-resistant, for which some families of compounds are identified. After endocentric compounds, the chapter deals with copulative compounds, which have been analysed and classified in relation to the nominal head. Participial compounds, given their special collocation inside the class of compound adjectives 1, are dealt separately in the following chapter. The final section is dedicated to exocentric compounds and borderline formations, whose status of compound adjectives is often questionable, due to their formal and semantic characteristics. Chapter four concentrates on the functional analysis of compound adjectives according to the notion of adjectivehood and prototypicality. The various
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