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.

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.

Multiword expressions (MWEs), such as noun compounds (e.g. nickname in English, and Ohrwurm in German), complex verbs (e.g. give up in English, and aufgeben in German) and idioms (e.g. break the ice in English, and das Eis brechen in German), may be interpreted literally but often undergo meaning shifts with respect to their constituents. Theoretical, psycholinguistic as well as computational linguistic research remain puzzled by when and how MWEs receive literal vs. meaning-shifted interpretations, what the contributions of the MWE constituents are to the degree of semantic transparency (i.e., meaning compositionality) of the MWE, and how literal vs. meaning-shifted MWEs are processed and computed. This edited volume presents an interdisciplinary selection of seven papers on recent findings across linguistic, psycholinguistic, corpus-based and computational research fields and perspectives, discussing the interaction of constituent properties and MWE meanings, and how MWE constituents contribute to the processing and representation of MWEs. The collection is based on a workshop at the 2017 annual conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) that took place at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany

Multiword expressions (MWEs) are a challenge for both the natural language applications and the linguistic theory because they often defy the application of the machinery developed for free combinations where the default is that the meaning of an utterance can be predicted from its structure. There is a rich body of primarily descriptive work on MWEs for many European languages but comparative work is little. The volume brings together MWE experts to explore the benefits of a multilingual perspective on MWEs. The ten contributions in this volume look at MWEs in Bulgarian, English, French, German, Maori, Modern Greek, Romanian, Serbian, and Spanish. They discuss prominent issues in MWE research such as classification of MWEs, their formal grammatical modeling, and the description of individual MWE types from the point of view of different theoretical frameworks, such as Dependency Grammar, Generative Grammar, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Lexicon Grammar.

This open access book provides new methodological and theoretical insights into temporal reference and its linguistic expression, from a cross-linguistic experimental corpus pragmatics approach. Verbal tenses, in general, and more specifically the categories of tense, grammatical and lexical aspect are treated as cohesion ties contributing to the temporal coherence of a discourse, as well as to the cognitive temporal coherence of the mental representations built in the language comprehension process. As such, it investigates the phenomenon of temporal reference at the interface between corpus linguistics, theoretical linguistics and pragmatics, experimental pragmatics, psycholinguistics, natural language processing and machine translation.

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