Parasynthetic compounds

Data and theory

Chiara Melloni | University of Verona

Antonietta Bisetto | University of Bologna

This chapter is dedicated to parasynthetic compounding, a word-formation phenomenon consisting of the merger of two lexical stems (forming a non-existent compound) with a derivational suffix. On the basis of several classes of data pertaining to Slavic and Romance, we outline a formal analysis of the phenomenon in question and show that a constructionist account, recently developed within the Construction Morphology framework, cannot be applied to a particular set of compounds. We show that a configurational analysis of these (pseudo)compound-affixed forms formulated along the lines of Ackema and Neeleman (2004) which applies a severe mapping between the morpho-syntactic and semantic structure, is not only able to account for the challenging data at issue, but also refines our comprehension of the synthetic compounding phenomena commonly attested in most I.E. languages.

Published online: 28 April 2010
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.311.16mel

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