Abstract
Italian V+N compounds, such as portalettere ‘mailman’, apriscatole ‘can opener’ and spartineve ‘snow plough’ are exocentric and denote an Agent or an Instrument. Their morphological structure is intensively discussed and has raised many controversies. In this paper, we focus on the inflectional features Number, Gender and the Thematic Role the compound refers to (Agent or Instrument). We argue that the assignment of these features is conditioned by conceptual structure. Thus the morphological building of these compounds has to interact not only with lexical semantics but also with the independent tier of conceptual structure in a systematic way. We provide an analysis of this interaction in terms of a two level semantics with indices.
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This paper follows up an analysis originally presented in 2007 at the 6th Mediterranean Morphology Meeting, University of Patras, Ithaca, Greece. More elaborated versions were presented at the Workshop on “Semantic features in derivational morphology”, Stuttgart 2008 (Klaus von Heusinger), and at the Dipartimento di Linguistica, University of Venice, in 2010 (Christoph Schwarze). We would like to thank the respective audiences for their helpful comments. We are much obliged to the two anonymous colleagues who read and commented the paper for the present journal, and to Geert Booij and Chiara Gianollo for helpful comments and suggestions. Finally, we gratefully acknowledge the support of this research by the German Science Foundation (SFB 732 Incremental Specification in Context for the first author, and SFB 471 Variation und Entwicklung im Lexikon for the second).
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von Heusinger, K., Schwarze, C. Italian V+N compounds, inflectional features and conceptual structure. Morphology 23, 325–350 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-013-9210-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-013-9210-z