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The verbal structure in English synthetic compounds

Paper · 2022 · Gianina Iordăchioaia and Artemis Alexiadou

Summary

The paper revisits a debate dating to the 1970s: do English synthetic compounds (SynCs) such as book reading, snow removal or lawn mower contain real verbal structure, or are they ordinary root compounds like cat food? The authors limit the study to compounds headed by suffixed deverbal nouns (-ing, -al, -(at)ion, -ment, -age, -ance, -er) and set zero-derived heads aside. Using Grimshaw's split between argument structure nominals (ArgStrNs), result nominals and simple event nominals, they argue that these compounds are ambiguous. When the head is an ArgStrN, the compound is a true SynC and its non-head is the verb's internal argument. When the head has a result or simple-event reading, the result is a root compound whose non-head can act as a modifier, including a subject-like one (police questioning). The analysis is set in Distributed Morphology, and the evidence comes from native-speaker judgments and corpus examples. The presence or absence of Voice explains three things: instrument versus person readings of -er compounds, whether an event is implied, and which verbal idioms can become compounds. The study clarifies how much verbal semantics a compound noun actually carries.

Key points

  • The analysis rests on Grimshaw's (1990) three readings of deverbal nouns: ArgStrN, ResN and SEvN. Two predicate tests separate them: events fit took a long time, while entities fit was on the table.
  • In true SynCs only the theme can be the non-head. This follows the hierarchy Agent < Goal < Theme, so gift-giving to children is fine but child-giving is not.
  • At minimum, true SynCs include a vP that hosts an internal argument, and like ArgStrNs they can additionally project VoiceP or AspectP.
  • -er compounds split by Voice:
    • Instrument readings lack Voice and carry no event implication.
    • Person/agent readings have Voice, which introduces the agent.
  • Idiom compounds follow the same split. Idioms that need Voice give person nouns (whistleblower), and idioms that do not need Voice give instruments (ice-breaker). eye-catcher is ambiguous between the two structures, and bucket-kicker is unavailable. The claimed contrast between SynCs and ArgStrNs for idioms turns out weaker than in Borer (2013).

Interesting ideas

  • I1. A deverbal compound's non-head can be read as the object of the base verb only when the head is a genuine argument-structure nominal; otherwise it is a free modifier that may even be agent-like.
  • I2. Simple compatibility tests with event predicates (took a long time) versus entity predicates (was on the table) can decide whether a nominal denotes an event or a thing.
  • I3. -er nouns split into instruments and agents depending on whether an agent layer is present, and only the agent reading implies that an event actually happened.
  • I4. The theme-only restriction gives principled ungrammatical contrasts (student-reading of books, child-giving).
  • I5. Whether a verbal idiom can become a compound depends on its internal structure, which explains the person/instrument pattern of whistleblower versus ice-breaker.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): when building frames from noun compounds, map snow removal to remove(Theme=snow). Treat police questioning-type cases as a separate modifier slot rather than forcing a Theme role.
  • I2 (world): use the same distinction to decide whether a nominalization creates an event node with participants or a plain entity in the world of the text. Contextual predicates can then serve as cues.
  • I3 (world): do not assume that X-er denotes a person who did X. Check the ontology (WordNet) for an instrument sense, and add no past-event fact when the instrument reading applies.
  • I4 (learn): turn such pairs into negative-control items for evaluating role assignment. A system that assigns Agent or Goal to a compound non-head is then flagged.
  • I5 (back): in generation, link idiom entries to their licensed compound forms, so the generator only produces attested-style compounds and never forms like bucket-kicker.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Humboldt-Universität zu BerlinBerlin · Germany19 works · 41,895 citations🔬Leibniz-Centre General LinguisticsBerlin · Germany7 works · 78 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPsychology · 1,552 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 870 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 works

Cite

Cite as Gianina Iordăchioaia and Artemis Alexiadou. 2022. The verbal structure in English synthetic compounds. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.8586

@article{iordachioaia2022verbal,
  title = {{The verbal structure in English synthetic compounds}},
  author = {Gianina Iordăchioaia and Artemis Alexiadou},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.8586},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.8586}
}

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