ErgSemantics_Compounding

ESD Test Suite Examples

  The garden dog barked.
  The Abrams picture arrived.
  Kim Browne arrived.
  Professor Browne arrived.
  The tobacco-happy dog barked.
  The state and local dogs barked.

Linguistic Characterization

Compounding comprises a variety of (semantic) head–modifier structures that can often be paraphrased using overt prepositions. But in instances of compounding there is a syntactic construction contributing an underspecified two-place relation. Medicine delivery, for example, could be paraphrased as delivery of medicine, whereas home delivery might be paraphrased as delivery at home. The phenomenon is characterized by the underspecified compound relation, whose shape and use are parallel to the semantics contributed by regular prepositions. While prototypical heads in compounds are nominals (introducing an instance), there can be exceptions: tobacco-happy is analyzed in terms of an event head. Compounding can interact with coordinate structures (e.g. in state and local dogs), when modifiers of the same head are conjoined.

MRS Fingerprints

The phenomenon can be sub-divided according to the (semantic) types of the head and modifier. The most basic instances, arguably, involve non-quantified or quantified modifiers to a nominal head, e.g. garden dog and Abrams picture, respectively.

  h0:compound(ARG1 x1, ARG2 x2)
  h0:_(ARG0 x1)
  _(ARG0 x2)

With event heads, the structure is very similar, except for the type of the ARG1 in the compound relation, e.g. for tobacco-happy:

  h0:compound(ARG1 e1, ARG2 x1)
  h0:_(ARG0 e1)
  _(ARG0 x1)

Interactions

When conjoining different types of modifiers (to a nominal head), compounding and coordination interact in syntactically subtle ways, but result in a comparatively straightfoward semantics, e.g. for state and local dogs:

  h0:compound(ARG1 x1, ARG2 x2)
  _(ARG0 x2)
  h1:_(ARG0 e1, ARG1 x1)
  h2:_and_c(L-HNDL h0, R-HNDL h1)
  h2:_(ARG0 x1)

Open Questions

Up until its 1214 release, the ERG made a distinction between compound and compound_name relations, but seeing that proper name heads in a compound construction can be unambiguously identified by their (proper_q) quantifier, this distinction was judged redundant.

The compound relation is also used in what Bender, et al. (2011) call the N-ed construction, as for example in rabbit-eared dog. Here, there are in fact two instances of the two-place compound relation, one relating the two elements of the N-ed construction (ear and rabbit), and another one connecting the construction as a whole to its head noun (i.e. dog). This is the only case where compound appears with its ARG1 as a syntactic subject. A deeper understanding of which nouns should be treated as relational may lead to revisions of this analysis. Possibly relevant here is Payne et al 2014.

Grammar Version

1214

More Information

• ErgSemantics main page

• Inventory of semantic phenomena (to be) documented

• How to cite this work