This book investigates one concrete compounding pattern in present-day Italian within a larger overview of Italian compounding. Various accounts and classifications of Noun + Noun combinations in Italian are reviewed, with special focus on the status of the lexical integrity hypothesis. The author sets out to propose an integrated approach to the Noun + Noun compounding pattern, rigorously based on large representative data sets that were extracted from the Italian web corpus ItWaC as both automatically and manually post-processed frequency lists. On the basis of such data, it is aimed to show the behaviour of various subtypes of Noun + Noun compounds. Starting out with the Bisetto-Scalise classification, the author carefully examines the status of coordinate compounds, ATAP compounds (i.e., the group comprising attributive and appositive structures) and subordinate compounds (comprising verbal-nexus and grounding compounds), discussing both theoretical and empirical implications of this classification scheme. Moreover, the original Bisetto-Scalise model is supplemented with further classification levels in order to capture specific compounding types such as relational (i.e. inherently trinominal) compounds. A major merit of the present study lies in the quantitative dimension of the data it deals with. In light of this data, the author emphasizes the gradient nature of the traditional dichotomy between syntax and compounding. The book will thus appeal not only to the linguists interested specifically in Italian word-formation, but also to a larger community of scholars who seek a more general view of the word-formation phenomena.

Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject Romance Studies - Italian and Sardinian Studies, grade: 1,0, Ruhr-University of Bochum (BA Linguistics), course: Wordformation Processes, language: English, abstract: Verb-noun (V+N) compounds have long been the subject of much discussion due to their special status as a highly productive word formation pattern in Romance languages. Especially in Italian, French and Spanish, different aspects about V+N compounds have been widely discussed among linguists. This paper focuses on Italian V+N compounds (also briefly touching on French and Spanish), outlining the key aspects that have been cause for debate in the past and giving the commonly accepted interpretation of them. Furthermore, the final vowel of the verbal constituent of V+N compounds is discussed as the main existing analyses are presented and contextualized.

Are compounds words or phrases - or are they neither or both? How should we classify compounds? How can we deal with the fact that the relationship between the elements of sugar pill ('pill made of sugar') is different from that in sea-sickness pill ('pill to prevent sea-sickness')? Are compounds a linguistic universal? How much do languages vary in the way their compounds work? Why do we need compounds, when there are other ways of creating the same meanings? Are so-called neoclassical compounds like photograph really compounds? Based on more than forty years' research, this controversial new book sets out to answer these and many other questions.

Presents three frameworks for studying morphology, offering different insights into the meaning of compounds.

What is semantic transparency, why is it important, and which factors play a role in its assessment? This work approaches these questions by investigating English compound nouns. The first part of the book gives an overview of semantic transparency in the analysis of compound nouns, discussing its role in models of morphological processing and differentiating it from related notions. After a chapter on the semantic analysis of complex nominals, it closes with a chapter on previous attempts to model semantic transparency. The second part introduces new empirical work on semantic transparency, introducing two different sets of statistical models for compound transparency. In particular, two semantic factors were explored: the semantic relations holding between compound constituents and the role of different readings of the constituents and the whole compound, operationalized in terms of meaning shifts and in terms of the distribution of specifc readings across constituent families. All semantic annotations used in the book are freely available.