Hierarchical NN compounds in a cross-linguistic perspective

The identification of consistent classes of compounds has been an issue since the research of early Indian grammarians and more recently it has received new attention in the linguistic literature. Starting from Bisetto & Scalise’s proposal (2005), namely that compounds may be divided into three classes, each of which may contain both endocentric and exocentric complex words, we shall show that these classes are not discrete, but rather that they constitute the points of a continuum. The authors will then test the behaviour of compounds belonging to these three classes in fusional languages from the Standard Average European area and in languages from the East and South-East Asian region, namely Chinese (isolating) and Japanese (agglutinating), to provide an example from each major morphological type. Their findings are that Bisetto & Scalise’s attributive / appositive (henceforth ATAP) compounds and subordinate (henceforth SUB) compounds apparently behave similarly in different languages, but having a phrasal constituent is possibly a unique property of subordinate compounds. As far as coordinate (henceforth CO) compounds are concerned, they will argue that two subclasses of coordinating compounds should be distinguished, namely “hyperonymic” and “hyponymic” compounds, as they behave in a rather different way.