Abstract
This article takes issue with the traditional view of English compounds such as governess-cum-piano-teacher, according to which the medial morpheme -cum- is insignificant. The study is first centered on the appearance of the linking element in the English language. New insight into its distribution and function is then provided by scrutinizing a list of 259 compounds extracted from a present-day newspaper corpus. It is found that -cum- appears exclusively in non-institutionalized coordinate nominal and adjectival compounds and that it plays a distinctive role which sets -cum- compounds apart from asyndetic compounds: the linking element is predominantly used in complex compounds to simultaneously mark the internal boundary (boundaries) within the construction and the coordinate relation that holds between the compounding elements. The discussion finally focuses on the status of -cum-, which appears to be a hybrid syntactic-morphological unit of present-day English.
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Renner, V. English cum, a borrowed coordinator turned complex-compound marker. Morphology 23, 57–66 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-013-9214-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-013-9214-8