engleski

The influence of underlying relationships and lexical relatedness on recognition of noun-noun compounds

This paper deals with the underlying relations between the constituents in endocentric noun-noun compounds. The head in an endocentric compound functions both as the semantic and the syntactic head and represents the more prominent part of the compound, which is more precisely defined by the modifier (Bauer et al. 2015). Even though the nature of the underlying relation between a head and a modifier is vague and differs from compound to compound (Jackendoff 2009, Booij 2010, inter alia), recognizing it can boost the retrieval of already familiar compounds and help resolve ambiguous compounds, or compounds whose head noun implies different meanings in different compounds (olive oil vs. baby oil) (Gagne 2010). These relations can be roughly seen as paraphrases of the compound (Lees 1960, Jackendoff 2009), i.e. sleeping pill can be roughly paraphrased as a pill used for sleeping, while water bottle can be paraphrased as a bottle used for storing water. In our research, we aim to analyze whether a common underlying relation has a more significant impact on retrieval of noun-noun compounds than lexical relatedness, i.e. whether the recognition of a compound like water bottle is faster when it is preceded by a compound with the same underlying relation (e.g. wine glass) or by a compound with a common lexeme but a different underlying relation (e.g. water vapour). We aim to investigate this issue using the experimental paradigm with native and non-native speakers of English as participants.

exical processing, noun-noun compounds, relational structures, heads, modifiers

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