Introduction to the volume (Special Issue on Romance Compounds)

Compared to derivation, compounding has often been a neglected topic in the morphological literature of the past decades. Today, the situation has changed and attention to compounding phenomena has considerably risen. This renewed interest for compounds is both of a theoretical and an empirical nature. Until a few years ago, accurate descriptions of compounding were available for a limited number of languages, first and foremost English, and for a rather limited number of types (e.g. root compounds, synthetic compounds). Therefore, the systematic and coherent collection of new empirical data from different languages was a necessary step towards a large-scale understanding of the phenomenon. The present special issue of Probus follows the latter line of research and aims at offering an up-to-date, critical description of compounds that belong to one linguistic family, i.e. the Romance family. At the same time, the papers are theoretically aware and discuss various crucial issues for morphological theory.