Parts of the body are often embedded in the structure of compound words, such asheartbreakandbrainchild. We explored the relationships between the semantics of compounds and their constituent body parts, asking whether these relationships are largely arbitrary or instead reflect deeper metaphorical mappings shared across languages and cultures. In three studies, we found that U.S. English speakers associated the English translation equivalents of Chinese compounds with their constituent body parts at rates well above chance, even for compounds with highly (...) abstract meanings and even when accounting for the semantic relatedness of the compounds and body parts. English speakers in India and Chinese speakers in Hong Kong showed similar intuitions about these associations. Our results suggest that the structure of compound words can provide insight into cross‐culturally shared ways of connecting meaning to the body. (shrink)

Large language models (LLMs) have been proposed as candidate models of human semantics, and as such, they must be able to account for conceptual combination. This work explores the ability of two LLMs, namely, BERT-base and Llama-2-13b, to reveal the implicit meaning of existing and novel compound words. According to psycholinguistic theories, understanding the meaning of a compound (e.g., “snowman”) involves its automatic decomposition into constituent meanings (“snow,” “man”), which are then connected by an implicit semantic relation (...) selected from a set of possible competitors (FOR, MADE OF, BY, …) to obtain a plausible interpretation (“man MADE OF snow”). Here, we leverage the flexibility of LLMs to obtain contextualized representations for both target compounds (e.g., “snowman”) and their implicit interpretations (e.g., “man MADE OF snow”). We demonstrate that replacing a compound with a paraphrased version leads to changes to the embeddings that are inversely proportional to the paraphrase's plausibility, estimated by human raters. While this relation holds for both existing and novel compounds, results obtained for novel compounds are substantially weaker, and older distributional models outperform LLMs. Nonetheless, the present results show that LLMs can offer a valid approximation of the internal structure of compound words posited by cognitive theories, thus representing a promising tool to model word senses that are at once implicit and possible. (shrink)

Aristotle, in De Interpretatione, only briefly suggests the distinction between compound nouns and nominal phrases. However, late ancient commentators provide more extensive analysis. My goal is to clarify their views, arguing that a common strategy among them is to demonstrate how compounds and nominal phrases contribute differently to the truth-conditions of declarative sentences. Nonetheless, I insist that the primary value of examining these commentators lies in avoiding certain anachronisms related to compounds. Specifically, Aristotle is not puzzled by the difference (...) between compounds and nominal phrases in the way we might be today. Instead, he uses compounds as convenient linguistic items serving a theoretical role in an a fortiori argument, establishing fundamental linguistic principles: that words are basic units of signification and that compositional meaning is a prerequisite for truth-value. (shrink)

Coining Compounds and Derivations - A Crosslinguistic Elicitation Study of Word-Formation Abilities of Preschool Children and Adults in Polish and English This paper examines word-formation abilities in coining compounds and derivatives in preschool children and adult speakers of two languages differing in overall word-formation productivity and in favoring of particular word-formation patterns. An elicitation picture naming task was designed to assess these abilities across a range of word-formation categories. Adult speakers demonstrated well-developed word-formation skills in patterns both typical and non-typical (...) for their native language. In contrast with adult results, preschool children predominantly coined innovations conforming to the general pattern of their language: Polish children favoring derivation and American children favoring compounding. The results show that although children are improving their wordformation skills during the preschool years, they need much more experience to come to the mature proficiency in using the variety of word-formation patterns available in their language. (shrink)

The current paper investigates two productive morphological processes, namely compounds and portmanteau words (or blends). While compounds, a productive, regular and predicable morphological process, have received much attention in the literature, little attention was paid to portmanteau words, a creative, irregular and unpredictable word formation process. The present paper aims to find the commonalities and differences between these morphological devices, using Rosch et al.’s (1975; 1976) theory of prototypes and basic-level categories to achieve this goal. This theory will (...) also be employed to discuss the literature on the word formation mechanisms under investigation and propose a new categorization approach to these neologisms. The analysis suggests that compounds and blends compare and contrast and that the distinctions between them are blurry. The analysis confirms that a prototypical approach is well suited to compounds and blends in English. This has implications for future research into English word-formation processes in general and compounds and blends precisely. (shrink)

Unlike in English, the role of phonology in word recognition in Chinese is unclear. In this event-related potential experiment, we investigated the role of phonology in reading both high- and low-frequency two-character compound Chinese words. Participants executed semantic and homophone judgment tasks of the same precede-target pairs. Each pair of either high- or low-frequency words were either unrelated or related semantically or phonologically. The induced P200 component was greater for low- than for high-frequency word-pairs both in semantic (...) and phonological tasks. Homophones in the semantic judgment task and semantically-related words in the phonology task both elicited a smaller N400 than the control condition, word frequency-independently. However, for low-frequency words in the phonological judgment task, it was found that the semantically related pairs released a significantly larger P200 than the control condition. Thus, the semantic activation of both high- and low-frequency words may be no later than phonological activation. (shrink)

This book explores a relatively little investigated area of creole languages, word-formation. It provides the most comprehensive account so far of the word-formation patterns of an English-based creole language, Sranan, as found in its earliest sources, and compares them with the patterns attested in the input languages. One of the few studies of creole morphology based on historical data, the book discusses the theoretical problems arising with the historical analysis of creole word-formation and provides an analysis along the lines of (...) Booij’s Construction Morphology in which the assumed boundaries between affixation, compounding and syntactic constructions play a very minor role. It shows that Early Sranan word-formation is characterised by the absence of superstrate derivational affixes, the use of free morphemes as derivational markers and of compounding as the major word-formation strategy. The emergence of Early Sranan word-formation involved multiple sources and different mechanisms. The findings render untenable theoretical accounts of creole genesis based on one explanatory factor, such as superstrate or substrate influence. (shrink)

Most Chinese words are compounds formed through the combination of meaningful characters. Yet, due to compositional complexity, it is poorly understood how this combinatorial process affects the access to the whole‐word meaning. In the present study, we turned to the recent development in compositional distributional semantics, and employed a deep neural network to learn the less‐than‐systematic relationship between the constituent characters and the compound words. Based on the compositional representations derived from the computational model, we investigated the (...) combinatorial process in terms of the degree of overlap between the compositional and the lexicalized representations as well as the degree of distinctness of the compositional representation. Analyses of lexical decision and eye‐tracking data revealed the effects of both compositional attributes over and above the effects of constituent character features and compound features, indicating an active engagement of the combinatorial process in compound processing. Moreover, with the increase of compound frequency, and thus the increased likelihood that the holistic route prevails, these compositional effects appeared to be dampened. These findings, therefore, provided a computational characterization for the dual‐route framework, which sheds light on the universal process of compound comprehension across different languages. (shrink)

Words come into existence through a number of distinct processes including naming, semantic shifts, morphological productivity, and compounding. In accounting for the instantiation and individuation of word-types, two diachronic proposals termed Originalism and History are considered, which view word-types as emerging through a tokening act after which they are subsequently distinguished from others on the basis of having a unique event-like origin. In the following paper I elucidate two central tenets of Originalism and History, which I name essentialism and (...) propagation. Next, I demonstrate that each suffer considerable challenges from evidence pertaining to the systematic generativity of words grounded in universal features of human lexical cognition. A third diachronic theory named Originalism-Plus-Transfer (OPT) is then outlined. I argue that this more nuanced version of Originalism, in its present form, still lacks a thorough explanation of pivotal features of word generativity, word instantiation, and word individuation. A number of ‘synchronic’ constraints on word-hood—phonological, phonotactic, morpho-syntactic, and semantic—are put forward to ground the possible space for word generation. I conclude by exploring the viability of supplementing OPT with synchronic constraints and propose that a union between the two has the potential to provide OPT with greater empirical strength and predictive power. The upshot of this analysis is that there exists great programmatic value for diachronic theories in drawing on synchronic data and that the latter must feature as central to the philosophy of words if such work is to anticipate achieving explanatory adequacy. (shrink)

Creative association is inherent and essential to creativity and insight. Here we utilised a Chinese compound Remote Associates Task (cRAT) to identify the potential impact of word order (i.e., solution position hereinafter) and word frequency on creative association across two behavioural experiments. Experiment 1 identified the effects of (a) word order and word frequency on cRAT-induced association without considering the specific strategies used during solving such problems and (b) their interaction not only on performance in solving the cRAT, including (...) solution time and accuracy, but also on difficulty rating. Following a coarse-to-fine approach, Experiment 2 examined the effect of both factors on creative association determined according to each participant’s trial-by-trial reports regarding insight solution strategies. Main effects of word order and word frequency, and a two-way interaction, were found on the accuracy and self-rated difficulty. These findings shed light on creative association, multiply-constrained problem solving and constructing compounds. (shrink)

Proper words in proper places, remarked Dean Swift, make the true definition of style. According to this definition, John Sparrow fully qualifies as a stylist. His skillful compound of wit, pungency, and accurate observation, his irreverence, his ear for language and hatred of cant are unsurpassed. This book brings together pieces broadcast by the BBC, a series of lectures at the University of Chicago, and, even, a university sermon. It proves that John Sparrow is one of those rare (...) people whose spoken words lose none of their power when translated to the printed page. (shrink)

There is a growing body of literature using the tools of syntactic models of word formation (e.g. Distributed Morphology) to provide analyses of language mixing phenomena, in particular word internal mixing. In fact, the very phenomenon of word internal mixing directly supports a syntactic approach to word formation, according to which words are structurally complex. On the basis of this view, the basic units of word formation involve roots that combine with functional elements in the syntax. The combination of (...) roots with functional elements creates words. This paper is in line with this work and investigates further the question of how word formation operates in cases of language mixing and what exactly is being mixed in mixing, i.e. words vs. roots. After reviewing literature on word internal mixing, I will discuss compound formation in language contact situations, the question being of how compounding in mixing can inform both theories of mixing and theories of word-hood. Compounding is important to answer the question of what exactly is being mixed in mixing, as language differ with respect to the units they employ for compound formation, i.e. words vs. roots and to the availability of linking elements to form compounds. Moreover, compounding is important to understand the role the two languages play in mixing, as languages differ with respect to head-ness (left or right) of their compounds. The data to be discussed will be a mixture of materials that have already been published in the literature and newly collected data and involve several mixing varieties, namely Greek-English, Greek-German, Greek-Turkish, Turkish-Norwegian, Turkish-Dutch and French-Dutch. (shrink)

A speech perception experiment provides evidence that the linguistic relationship between words affects the discrimination of their talkers. Listeners discriminated two talkers' voices with various linguistic relationships between their spoken words. Listeners were asked whether two words were spoken by the same person or not. Word pairs varied with respect to the linguistic relationship between the component words, forming either: phonological rhymes, lexical compounds, reversed compounds, or unrelated pairs. The degree of linguistic relationship between the (...) class='Hi'>words affected talker discrimination in a graded fashion, revealing biases listeners have regarding the nature of words and the talkers that speak them. These results indicate that listeners expect a talker's words to be linguistically related, and more generally, indexical processing is affected by linguistic information in a top-down fashion even when listeners are not told to attend to it. (shrink)

Hogue's Irregular Verbs of Attic Prose - The Irregular Verbs of Attic Prose, their forms, prominent meanings, and important compounds; together with lists of related words and English derivatives. By Addison Hogue, Professor of Greek in the University of Mississippi. Ginn and Co., 1889. 6s. - Volume 4 Issue 4.

I. Latin interpres, miles etc. and the confix -et-, ‘errans,’ cf. -etum ‘allee.’In Am. Jr. Phil. 28, 413 I derived the suffix in Gothic fram-aps ‘alienus’, Latin com-et- ‘socius– and Greek τ ‘comites’ from the root et- ‘errare, ire’; and I proposed the name ‘confix’ for a suffix whose origin could be traced back to an original compounding element. I now find further evidence for the confix -et- in Latin interpret-, ‘go-between’; and I explain pr-et- as a fusion-product of the (...) synonymous roots PER- and ET- ‘errare, ire’. Nor is this explanation in conflict with the current comparison between interpres and Gothic frops ‘klug, verstandig’: it is simply that ‘go-between’ is nearer the meaning. The wisdom attributed to the wanderer, to the traveller in far lands,–an idea forever embalmed for English folk in Shakespeare's counter-turn. (shrink)

Nicholas and Joseph (this volume) identify a class of previously unnoticed compounds of the form V+V in modern Greek, and establish some significant descriptive generalizations about them. They argue that V+V compounds are true morphological compound words, the verbal analogs of nominal dvandva compounds, and not syntactic phrases or verb clusters. The existence of such compounds in Greek is interesting because true dvandva compounds in most languages (including all other Indo-European languages, it seems) are restricted to the nominal (...) domain. N&J present historical data which suggests that the first attested examples of verbal dvandvas come from postclassical nominal dvandvas by back-formation plus reanalysis. (shrink)

Plato's fondness for words compounded with παν- is obvious at the most cursory reading of his works; this characteristic of his style becomes even more striking when his use of these words is compared with their frequency in earlier authors. An investigation of Platonic usage in this respect, relatively easy since the publication of Leonard Brandwood's Word Index to Plato , yields interesting results. Whether the effect of the παν-prefix is intensive or determinative , Plato has a tendency (...) to associate these words with some sort of disapproval; this disapproval is sometimes explicit enough and can sometimes be inferred from the use of the word, or of a word related to it, in other contexts. The words may be used ironically, as πγκαλος often is and πσσοος always. Another sort of disapproval springs from what may be called Plato's general dislike of (promiscuous plurality, excess and variety; for a philosopher who believes in single, unchanging Forms there is something intrinsically objectionable in such words as πμπολυς and παντοδαπς. It also transpires that Plato may have coined a number, of these words and that he was probably the first prose writer to import others from poetry; in the face of the fragmentary nature of surviving Greek literature it would be unwise to be more dogmatic. The following, somewhat dry, survey will, it is hoped, throw some light on the usage of these interesting words. (shrink)

Philosophical views of language have traditionally been focused on notions of truth. This is a reconstructive view in that we try to extract from an utterance in context what the sentence and speaker meaning are. This focus on meaning extraction from word sequences alone, however, is challenged by utterances which combine different types of figures. This paper argues that what appears to be a special case of ironic utterances—ironic metaphorical compounds—sheds light on the requirements for psychological plausibility of a theory (...) of communication and thus presents a different view of communication and language to that dominant in philosophy of language. In the view presented here, the hearer does not extract the speaker’s communicative intention from the sequence of words in the utterance, but from other channels, so as to constrain the inferential space for the sentence and speaker meaning. Specifically, we examine an example of ironic metaphor discussed by Stern. He argues that ironic content is logically dependent on metaphorical content, but makes no claims about how psychologically plausible this is in terms of the processing order. We argue that a straightforward translation of logical order into temporal order makes little sense. The primary sticking point is that without a prior understanding of the speaker’s communicative intentions, it is computationally more challenging to process the sub-component meanings. An alternative solution based on communicative channels leads us to a more psychologically plausible account of the structure of communicative acts and intentions. This provides support for the psychological realism of a richer theory of communicative intent. (shrink)

Semantic priming has been a focus of research in the cognitive sciences for more than 30 years and is commonly used as a tool for investigating other aspects of perception and cognition, such as word recognition, language comprehension, and knowledge representations. Semantic Priming: Perspectives from Memory and Word Recognition examines empirical and theoretical advancements in the understanding of semantic priming, providing a succinct, in-depth review of this important phenomenon, framed in terms of models of memory and models of word recognition. (...) The first section examines models of semantic priming, including spreading activation models, the verification model, compound-cue models, distributed network models, and multistage activation models (e.g. interactive-activation model). The second section examines issues and findings that have played an especially important role in testing models of priming and includes chapters on the following topics: methodological issues (e.g. counterbalancing of materials, choice of priming baselines); automatic vs. strategic priming; associative vs. "pure" semantic priming; mediated priming; long-term semantic priming; backward priming; unconscious priming; the prime-task effect; list context effects; effects of word frequency, stimulus quality, and stimulus repetition; and the cognitive neuroscience of semantic priming. The book closes with a summary and a discussion of promising new research directions. The volume will be of interest to a wide range of researchers and students in the cognitive sciences and neurosciences. (shrink)

Exocentric compounding is a creative morphological process that contributes to the English lexicon. However, because it lacks a syntactic or semantic head, it was deemed an exceptional case in most word-formation literature and hence neglected. Previous work has only been limited to syntax-based grammar and the notion of headedness and thus failed to address the other linguistic rules that constrain exocentric compounds. The current paper aims to identify the frequency of exocentric compounds and thus to determine their viability. The research (...) will also look into how conceptual metaphor and/or conceptual metonymy motivate exocentric compound formation. The results demonstrate that exocentric compounds are viable lexical units, generating content words (e.g., adjectives and adverbs) through productive word-formation processes, and extending word senses. The results also suggest that conceptual metonymy is more active than conceptual metaphor in the formation of exocentric compounds. The present findings have several implications for research on exocentric compounds, conceptual metonymy and conceptual metaphor. (shrink)

In the traditional view, blends, unlike compounds, are excluded from grammar and word-formation, so they are considered dichotomous under the either-or methodology. This research studies the nature of the relationship between compounds and blends from a cognitive linguistic perspective. A data set on both neologisms is investigated to determine whether the border between them is clear. Consequently, the researcher's first assumption is confirmed in that the boundaries between compounds and blends are blurred, finding out cases that belong to the fuzzy (...) border; that is to say, cases difficult to determine whether they are compounds or blends are identified. The alternative categorization might be one that views compounds and blends as shades of grey. With the blurring of the border concerned, only typical compounds and typical blends show some 'difference' at the level of form, which is explicated as a metonymical extension. In addition, a study of the internal structure of both compounds and blends to determine the kinds of schemas they have is done. The results show that compounds and blends have the same schemas. (shrink)

We argue that although E-Z Reader does a good job in simulating many basic facts related to readers' eye movements, two phenomena appear to pose a challenge to the model. The first has to do with word length mediating the way compound words are identified; the second concerns the effects of initial fixation position in a word on eye behavior.

Due to new innovations and changes, every language needs new words simply because there is a need for new words to name new things. It is a common occurrence for a speaker to use some words in a way that has never been used before in order to communicate directly about certain facts or ideas. When new inventions and changes come into people’s lives, there is a need to name them and talk about them. If a new (...) word is used by many speakers of the language, it will probably survive, and the same word will one day become an everyday word and enter the vocabulary of a language. This paper looks at compounding as one of the most productive word formation process in English. The term compounding refers to a process in which two or more lexemes are combined into one new word. When a word is formed by merging two or more words, each of which can be used separately, it is called a compound word. The term “word formation” has no universally accepted use. Word formation is sometimes defined as a process associated with changing the form of a word, for example, affixation, which is, in fact, the subject of morphology. In a broader sense, word formation covers the processes of creating new lexical items. In English, word formation is of great importance because this phenomenon affects the English dictionary, which in addition to borrowing from various other languages is enriched in this way. The aim of this paper was to investigate the context based vs. non-context interpretation of English compounds by EFL students in legal discourse. The findings from the test run-questionnaire showed that students of English as a foreign language found it more difficult to apply compound words in context rather than choosing an appropriate definition for them, with or without a given context. Furthermore, students scored lower when 50% of the compounds were given in context. (shrink)

Sanskrit nominal compounds, highly productive at all stages of the language, are normally formed by combining bare nominal stems (sometimes with special stem-forming endings) into a compound stem, which bears exactly one lexical accent. A class of Vedic dvandva compounds (also known as copulative compounds, co-ordinating compounds, or co-compounds) diverge from this pattern in that each of their constituents has a separate word accent and what looks like a dual case ending.1 They are invariably definite, and refer to conventionally (...) associated pairs of divine or human beings, or personified natural and ritual objects. (shrink)

Reading comprehension is never considered a simple task in linguists’ views as it requires a full set of linguistic knowledge, such as word decoding, understanding syntactic and morphological structures, and deriving proper meanings from these structures in a given context. Bearing the simple view of reading, the primary goal of this study is to explore whether the split presentation of Chinese splittable compounds influences the recognition of the compounds in second language (L2) Chinese reading comprehension, and how the reading skills, (...) i.e., word decoding and linguistic comprehension, cooperate to complete this reading comprehension task. Splittable compounds (SCs) in Chinese are typically verbs composed of two constituents with limited separability. The separable property of SCs and their vague morpho-syntactic status are supposed to cause difficulties for L2 Chinese learners in recognizing the compounds. Especially for those whose native language manifests lexical integrity, the split presentation of the compounds may invite the L2 Chinese readers to process them with a mechanism different from that for their non-split forms. To the best of our knowledge, the efforts on investigating this issue are insufficient. In this study, 27 Spanish speaking L2 Chinese learners were invited to complete tasks including reading and interpreting 6 selected SCs in the split and non-split forms, rating their familiarities with each SC and reporting the syntactic category of the SCs based on their existing linguistic knowledge. The results, showed that the split presentation of SCs did cause challenges for L2 Chinese learners in recognizing the compounds in the reading process, regardless of their Chinese proficiencies. The L2 Chinese participants performed significantly worse in recognizing split SCs in salient Verb-Object structures than recognizing those in unsalient Verb-Object structures. These findings underscore the importance of linguistic comprehension in L2 Chinese in-text word reading comprehension and suggest words as the basic processing units. (shrink)

The study aimed to evaluate the intervention effects on spelling and meaning of compounds by Greek students via group board games in classroom settings. The sample consisted of 60 pupils, who were attending the first and second grade of two primary schools in Greece. Each grade-class was divided into an intervention ( N = 29 children) and a control group ( N = 31 children). Before intervention, groups were evaluated by standardized tests of reading words/pseudowords, spelling words, and (...) vocabulary. Students were also assessed on compound knowledge by a word analogy task, a meaning task and a spelling task. The experimental design of the intervention included a pre-test, a training program, and a post-test. The pre- and post-assessments consisted of the spelling and the meaning tasks entailing equally morphologically transparent and opaque compounds. The training program was based on word families ( N = 10 word families, 56 trained items, 5 sessions) and aimed to offer instruction of morphological decomposition and meaning of words. The findings showed that training was effective in enhancing the spelling and most notably the meaning of compounds. A closer inspection of intervention data in terms of morphological transparency, revealed that training group of first graders improved significantly both on transparent and opaque compounds, while the degree of gains was larger on opaque items for the second graders. These findings are consistent with the experimental literature and particularly optimistic for the literacy enhancement of typically developing children in regular classrooms. (shrink)

I have not had the advantage of seeing H. C. Muller's treatise on word-composition in Greek referred to in his note on Greek Dvandva compounds in the January issu of the Classical Quarterly. But I venture to add a fee more words, chosen without special research, to confirm the curious facility, which he notes, of mediaeval and modern Greek in the formation of these compounds.

Compounding is one of the most productive word-formation processes in contemporary Standard English. Hence, new patterns occur regularly. Productivity is one of the characteristic features of human language which implies the ability to create and understand new word forms by the speaker of a language. This was the starting point and motivation of this paper. The main aim of this paper was to investigate the morphological productivity of nominal and verb compounds in English as a foreign language in terms of (...) the most productive and the least productive patterns of compounds in a written English corpus (consisted of 60073 words) by 75 students enrolled in undergraduate studies at the Law Faculty at SEEU. The quantitative measure used for the evaluation of the productivity of compounding patterns was according to hapax legomenon [P = n1 / N]. Findings from the empirical approach show that the most productive compounds in the analyzed corpus (professional /legal English context) are verb compounds, followed by special noun compounds, whereas the least productive were noun compounds. The analysis of the corpus showed that morphological productivity in compounding increased in the writing of students with higher degree of competence and proficiency of English. (shrink)

Of Aristophanes' comedy Αολοσκων we have only seventeen fragments, not extensive enough to allow us an accurate judgment about the contents; but it seems certain that the second performance of the play belongs to the so-called Middle Comedy, and the various fragments are well explained in the beautiful edition of Blaydes. I will add only some words about the title.

Common ratio effects should be ruled out if subjects’ preferences satisfy compound independence, reduction of compound lotteries, and coalescing. In other words, at least one of these axioms should be violated in order to generate a common ratio effect. Relying on a simple experiment, we investigate which failure of these axioms is concomitant with the empirical observation of common ratio effects. We observe that compound independence and reduction of compound lotteries hold, whereas coalescing is systematically (...) violated. This result provides support for theories which explain the common ratio effect by violations of coalescing instead of violations of compound independence. (shrink)

The article shows that in the Archaic period the Greeks did not possess a term equivalent to Classical ποιητής “poet-composer.” The principal meaning of the word άοιδός, often claimed to correspond to ποιητής and modern English poet, was “tuneful” or “singer” . The secondary meaning “poet working in the hexameter medium” is limited to the post-Iliadic hexameter corpus. It is furthermore possible to show that the simplex άοιδός was backderived from a compound. More specifically, following Hermann Koller, I propose (...) that the secondary meaning, being an epic innovation, developed from the compound *θεσπιαοιδός “singer of things divine,” whereas the primary meaning “singer” may go back to έπαοιδός, which later acquired the specialized meaning “singer of incantations.”. (shrink)

Multi-word formation processes in Portuguese comprise root-compounding (e.g., toxicodependente ‘drug addict’, agridoce ‘sour sweet’), word-compounding (e.g., barco-casa ‘houseboat’, guarda-roupa ‘wardrobe’, cantora-atriz ‘singer/actress’), and blending (e.g., cartomente ‘lying fortune teller’ < cartomante ‘fortune teller’ + mente ‘he/she lies’, tristemunho ‘sad testimony’ < triste ‘sad’ + testemunho ‘testimony’, cantautor ‘singer and composer’ < cantor singer + autor ‘composer’). Compound structures have been quite thoroughly described by several authors (e.g., Villalva & Gonçalves 2015), whereas blending has garnered some controversial and even contradictory (...) analyses. Some authors claim that blends and compounds have similar structures, while others consider that they have completely different structures (e.g., Gries 2004b, Minussi & Nóbrega 2014). This paper focuses on the description and analysis of an annotated corpus of Portuguese blends, and on the presentation of experimental evidence that aims to assess the knowledge of these words by native young adult European and Brazilian Portuguese speakers.The first section is devoted to the presentation of Portuguese blends, namely regarding the status of their constituents and their linear relationships, grammatical structure, and the phonetic/prosodic relationship that holds between the blends and their base words. The second section focuses on the description of the Portuguese blend corpus. Although new coinages make this a never-ending work in progress, it is presently formed by (circa) 300 blends, collected in a variety of sources, from literary texts to political and social commenting, advertising, or even individual ad hoc instances. The information gathered in the corpus comprehends all the features considered in the analysis of the blends, presented in section 1, and it also provides data on attestation and frequency. The third section presents an analysis of a sub-corpus (184 forms), related to their linear structure, grammatical and prosodic relationships, and a cross-analysis that suggests that there is a strong link between headedness and cliphood. Finally, the fourth section offers a brief presentation of experimental work that suggests that clips facilitate the processing of blends, since the clipped word is more frequently used in replies to a familiarity test, and the same happens with reaction time values obtained in a lexical decision test. (shrink)

This paper looks at the metaphorical and metonymic expressions derived fromnsa, ‘hand’. I will analyse and discuss hand metaphoric and metonymic expressions in relation with the universal concept of the agility and versatility of the hand as an important aspect of the human being. The paper projects the concept of the hand in the Akan cultural system and looks at how it has expanded into compound words, idioms and proverbs. We will look at the cognitive, semantics, sociolinguistics and (...) pragmatics ofnsa, ‘hand’. The paper is discussed under the theory of conceptual metaphor as expounded by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and followed by many scholars in the western world, Asia and Africa. (shrink)

L’attention qu’Edgar Morin prête au langage du point de vue théorétique est bien connue : nombreuses sont les réflexions sur ce sujet éparpillées dans son œuvre, en particulier dans les six tomes de La Méthode. Prenant pour point de départ cet œuvre et les nœuds essentiels de son discours sur la langue, je me suis concentrée particulièrement sur le lexique inépuisable de Morin, véritable terrain de création, offrant quelques exemples significatifs de son souci d’expressivité et de son « aptitude combinatoire, (...) inventive » : mots composés, mots dérivés, mots juxtaposés, et bien d’autres encore.Attention Edgar Morin ready to language theoretic point of view is well known there are many scattered thoughts on this subject in his work, particularly in the six volumes of the method. Taking as its starting point the work and its key nodes discourse on language, I focused particularly on the lexicon inexhaustible Morin, true field of creation, with some significant examples of his concern expressiveness and his "ability combinatorial inventive "compound words, derived words, words juxtaposed, and many others. (shrink)