On the Creation and Use of English Compound Nouns

Abstract

A number of experimental tasks were conducted in which subjects were asked to interpret and create novel noun + noun compounds. The results indicate that the semantic relationships that hold between the members of these compounds cannot be characterized in terms of a finite list of ‘appropriate compounding relationships’. Rather, the appropriateness of a given relationship depends on the use to which the compound will be put, the interpretability of the compound, and the extent to which it allows full exploitation of the informational resources of the compound form. These constraints derive in part from the fact that compounds, as lexical items, serve different linguistic functions than sentences do. This crucial distinction, and the existence of the constraints revealed by this study, are obscured by models which generate compounds from underlying clausal structures.