Constituent order in compounds and syntax: typology and diachrony

Abstract

The paper addresses the question of the correspondence between constituent order in compounds and in syntax. While a strictly synchronic perspective does not lead us to any significant generalization as ascertained by Bauer (Language typology and language universals, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin 2001), adopting a diachronic point of view allows us to formulate the question in general terms by making reference to the logical problem of what is the transition permitted from a certain synchronic stage to another. On the basis of a large language sample, it is shown that constituent order in compounds heavily relies on syntax. This must be understood in the terms of a diachronic universal reflecting Hawkins' (Word order universals, Academic Press, New York 1983) Double Acquisition Hypothesis. For this specific property of compounds, morphology does not seem to be autonomous from syntax, albeit the relation between morphology and syntax must be thought of as a multi-faceted one.

Headedness in Word Formation and Lexical Semantics: Evidence from Italiot and Cypriot (University of Patras, 2014)

“…This chapter was devoted to the study Section 6.3 presents the very few systematic approaches which deal directly with the issue of constituent order in syntactic phrases and morphological configurations. In more detail, Section 6.3.1 presents the typological and historical works of Harris and Campbell (1995), Bauer (2001), Gaeta (2008), and Wälchli (2005). Section 6.3.2 focuses on the Right-hand Head Rule (Williams, 1981b), the Head Ordering Principle (Hawkins and Gilligan, 1988), and the idea that the linear order in any morphological configuration, derived or compound word, could be predicted by the general grammatical settings with respect to headedness (Lieber, 1992).…”

“…The former makes no provision for such a change, whereas in the latter we do not expect to find contemporaneous compounds and phrases with different head-dependent linearization settings. On this issue, it should be mentioned that Hypothesis 4 makes another prediction; no change in the linearization of compound members is expected to arise without previous change in phrases (see also Gaeta, 2008). This means that the motivation for change in the head-dependent order inside compounds is syntax.…”

“…In another typological survey, focusing on both the synchronic and diachronic aspect of this issue, Gaeta (2008) uses a sample of 50 languages from a wide number of language families and offers the most comprehensive typological research on the question of correspondence between word-and morpheme order in compounds. In more detail, Gaeta uses his sample to test the following two hypotheses:…”

Transitivity and valency: from theory to acquisition

“…In particular, since nominal compound order varies considerably and appears to correlate with the order of possessor and noun (Gaeta 2008), one might expect the order of the two verbs in a bipartite SVC to correlate with the order of subordinate clause and main clause, or with the order of object and verb. However, OV languages show the same order of the verbs, as illustrated by the Ijo example in (30).…”

Semantics of Complex Words

“…point of view compounding has to be reduced to syntax (cf. Gaeta 2008). In this sense, Lex 2 can be said to emerge diachronically from Lex 1 .…”