V-Compounding in Dutch and Italian

The aim of this article is to investigate how different two languages can be in the domain of compounding, describe accurately these differences and propose some hypotheses to explain them. We focus only on compound words containing the lexical category V (in short, V-compounds), a highly frequent type in Dutch and Italian. V-compounds include words with the structures [V+X] and [X+V], but also those with the secondary structures [[V+af]+X] or [X+[V+af]]). We carry our comparative research using compound words listed in the MORBO-COMP database, currently under development at the University of Bologna. Our analysis covers the strictly formal (structural) level as well as the semantic characteristics of V-compounds. We show that V-compounds in Dutch and Italian differ mainly structurally while from a semantic point of view they seem to be almost equivalent. Finally, we point out that the formal differences between Dutch and Italian emerging from this comparative research must be explained in terms of a typology of compounding, an almost inexistent topic in the morphological literature. We thus review some interesting proposals in this field and make some suggestions on the possible directions that a typology of compounding has yet to undertake.