compound
: compound
The compound
relation is used to analyze compounds, that is, combinations of lexemes that morphosyntactically behave as single words. Commonly occurring cases are:
- Nominal compounds written as separate words, for example English apple juice.
- Particle verbs where the particle is realized as a separate word (which may alternate with affixed particles), for example Swedish byta ut (‘exchange’; cf. utbytt, ‘exchanged’). The subtype compound:prt is commonly used in this case.
- Serial verbs, for which the subtype compound:svc is commonly used, as in this Nupe example (Tallerman 2014):
Each language that uses compound
should develop its own specific criteria based on morphosyntax (rather than lexicalization or semantic idiomaticity), though elsewhere the term “compound” may be used more broadly.
See also:
English Examples
Not compound
Just because an expression is lexicalized or idiomatic does not mean compound
applies.
In English, adjective-noun combinations, prepositional phrases, and light verb constructions are better described with other relations:
compound in other languages: [bej] [cop] [cs] [de] [el] [en] [et] [eu] [fi] [fr] [ga] [gd] [gsw] [hu] [hy] [it] [ja] [kk] [ky] [no] [pcm] [pt] [qpm] [ro] [ru] [sv] [swl] [tr] [u] [urj] [xcl] [yue] [zh]