How to account for the expressive nature of phrasal compounds in a conceptual-semantic framework

• Published in: SKASE journal of theoretical linguistics Vol. 11; no. 1; pp. 33 - 60
• Main Author: Carola Trips
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: The Slovak Association for the Study of English 01.06.2014
• ISSN: 1336-782X; 1336-782X

This paper discusses the expressive nature of phrasal compounds (PCs) in English (and German) and proposes an analysis in a conceptual-semantic framework like Jackendoff's model of Parallel Architecture. PCs are very interesting from a theoretical point of view since they challenge traditional (generative) frameworks based on syntactocentricity and a strict division between the lexicon and grammar. I assume that the nature of PCs can only be understood if their conceptual-semantic properties are taken into account. From this follows that a model which only looks at the surface syntactic appearance cannot satisfyingly provide an analysis of PCs. On the basis of some studies on the expressive nature of German PCs, English PCs gained from the British National Corpus (BNC) will be investigated. I will show that the types of PCs occurring in both languages are the same and that the conceptual-semantic classification assumed for German PCs can be applied to the English PCs. Second, I will sketch an analysis that explains the special semantic properties of PCs by assuming a difference between PCs containing and predicate and PCs not containing a predicate. Further, the interplay between these properties, the morphological redundancy rule for NNCs, type (mis)matching and, as a result, instances of metonymic coercion can account for the "expressive flavour" attributed to PCs. Since this morphological phenomenon can be analysed adequately in a model where semantic structures are built in an independent generative component of semantics linked via components of interface rules to generative components of syntax and phonology, it provides us with new insights into the place of morphology and more generally into the architecture of grammar. Keywords: phrasal compounds, Parallel Architecture, conceptual semantics, expressivity, morphopragmatics