In last weekâs episode about compounds, we talked about how words have heads. The head of a word is the part that determines the overall grammatical features of the whole, like its syntactic category - adjective, noun, whatever. And in words that contain a single root, alongside one or more affixes, itâs the last one to connect up that gets to decide whether the final result is a noun, a verb, or something else. So, when youâve got a bunch of suffixes attached to the end of your word, itâs the last one that dictates exactly what that word will be.
Letâs check an example. The suffix â-izeâ usually takes a noun and turns it into a verb; so, the noun âcharacterâ becomes the verb âcharacterize.â
(1)   character + ize   =   characterize
But that wonât last long, if another affix wanders into the picture. The suffix â-ationâ will easily turn any verb it touches into a noun, without a care for what might have come before; the verb âcharacterize,â which started off as a noun, regains some of its former identity as the word âcharacterization.â
(2)   characterize + ation   =   characterization
But when it comes to compound words, which involve two or more fully formed words, how do speakers decide which one gets to be in charge? This turns out to be language-specific.
In many languages, like English and German, the category of the rightmost word becomes the category of the whole thing. In English, a âhitmanâ is a noun, just like âmanâ is. In German, a âtreffpunktâ â which combines the verb âtreffenâ (meet) with the noun âpunktâ (point) â ends up as a noun, too. So, these languages are right-headed.
(3)Â Â Â [N [V hit][N man]]
(4)Â Â Â [N [V treffen][N punkt]]
Other languages, like Vietnamese, are left-headed. Combining the noun ânhaâ (establishment) and the verb âthuongâ (wounded), we get the word ânha-thuongâ â a compound noun meaning âhospital.â
(5)Â Â Â [N [N nha][V thuong]]
When the compound is made up of nouns, control over features like gender and number again fall to the head. The plural of âbeehiveâ is âbeehives,â not âbeeshive.â In German, the compound word âlastwagenâ (truck) winds up masculine; âlastâ (cargo) is feminine, but the head âwagenâ (vehicle) is masculine.
And when only verbs have made their way into the word? The head carries information about tense, since itâs âfreeze-driedâ and not âfroze-dry.â
Something not touched on much in the episode was that English is semantically right-headed, too; the rightmost part of a compound spells out just what kind of thing the word refers to. So, a âtrain robberyâ is a kind of robbery, not a kind of train.
(6a)   train + robbery   =   a robbery
(6b)   train + robbery   â    a train
However, the syntactic and semantic right- or left-headedness of a word can only be determined for endocentric compounds. As their name suggests (if you know a little Latin), endocentric compounds derive their category and meaning from somewhere inside the word. But languages can have exocentric compounds, too â compound words whose syntactic and semantic features appear to come from outside the word.
In spite of English being right-headed, a âscarecrowâ isnât a kind of crow, âBigfootâ isnât a kind of foot, and (as we mentioned in the episode) a âbirdbrainâ isnât actually a brain. The exocentricity of these words is made even more obvious by the fact that âBigfootâ doesnât undergo irregular pluralization in the way that its rightmost member âfootâ does, when itâs by itself; while the plural of âfootâ is âfeet,â having more than one âBigfootâ around means youâve got many âBigfootsâ, not âBigfeet.â
We might go so far as to speculate that such words actually contain an invisible head, which silently works to provide the word with its various features. Such unseen structure would mean that exocentric compounds arenât so different after all, and could account for why words like âBigfootâ pluralize regularly: it isnât the root âfootâ that bears the number features of this word, but something unpronounced, just to the right of it. Of course, since these hypothesized heads are hidden, we can only detect them indirectly.
Finally, weâve got dvandva compounds (from the Sanskrit word for âpairâ). When you just canât pick which half of the word will be the head, why not go for both! English has a few dvandva compounds in its inventory: a âmanservantâ is both a man and a servant, and the term âspace-timeâ refers to both parts acting as one single thing. But other languages are much more productive: like, the Malayalam word for âparentsâ is formed by combining the words âacchanâ (father) and âamma,â (mother), along with a plural suffix. And other roots can combine in a similar fashion.
(7)Â Â Â acchanammamaarĚe
Of course, there are more ways to divide up compounds, beyond these categories. But, those will have to wait for a future installment! ^_^
Heads Up: how the structure of sentences makes some languages feel exactly opposite to English http://wp.me/p4fJvX-aSS
oh my god language nerd i am learning turkish and it feels like everything is backwards!!!! AM I CRAZY WHYYYYYYYYYYY???
-alimi
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Dear Alimi,
You are not crazy, o emphatic person. You are totally correct. Donât flip, itâll be okay.
Sentences are made of words. Mind-blowing, I know. But the words donât come in any ol random order. They come in chunks. Think about this sentence for a sec:
I bought myself a Cadbury's Boost (other chocolate bars are available, though none are as good if you want to ingest maximum calories). It describes itself thus:
2 x milk chocolate with caramel and biscuit filling bars
(It was a Boost Duo, OK? Don't judge me.)
Does that sound at all odd to you? Grammatically, I mean; it obviously sounds perfect in terms of content, though it does sell itself short, in my opinion. It's so much more than just 'caramel and biscuit'. But syntactically, it's really awkward.Â
Happily, the reason for its awkwardness can be attributed to the constraint that I work on. It's called the Final-Over-Final Constraint (FOFC), and it's about what phrases can be combined in what order. It specifically states that one order is not allowed, and it's the one instantiated in the description of my delicious chocolatey snack (although it's so many calories, it might have to be my delicious chocolatey tea).Â
This is the (partial) structure, as far as I can work it out:
[[milk chocolate [with caramel and biscuit filling]] bars]
Bars is the head of the phrase. It's at the end, as you can see. This means that it's a head-final phrase. FOFC states (basically) that a head-final phrase should not immediately 'dominate' (i.e. have as its immediate constituent) a head-initial phrase (that would be one where the head is at the start). The phrase milk chocolate with caramel and biscuit filling is just such a head-initial phrase, with chocolate as its head (we're not going to talk about milk now - it doesn't affect the argument). So we have precisely the relationship that FOFC doesn't like.Â
This type of construction is sometimes found: the quick-off-the-mark athlete, his out-of-the-blue question. These are marginal, for most people, and it's not a very productive construction: *a happy in his job employee is not good at all. The ones that are accepted are often taken to contain a lexicalised or Spelt-Out element - that is, the first part is not interpreted as having any internal structure, so any structural constraints don't apply to its parts, only to it as a whole, as if it was one word. The Boost description, I think we can agree, is definitely compositional (that is, it's built by the syntax, not interpreted as a single unit), so that explanation doesn't hold and we get a decidedly dodgy bundle of words.Â
In fact, this is such a mangled piece of syntax that there are at least two other reasons why this is bad. It leaves us hanging a long time before we get to the head, which we English speakers are none too keen on, and furthermore, the PP with caramel and biscuit fillingmodifies bars, not milk chocolate, so it should follow bars. Why it's where it is at all is beyond me. So we don't need FOFC to write this off as a bad job. But as we have FOFC for other reasons anyway, we can add it to the long list of Things Cadbury's Has Bungled.Â
(P.S. You may have noticed that Final-Over-Final Constraint violates itself. Its originators are quite proud of this, although it was accidental - the observation is attributed to Gertjan Postma. They note that all the best generalisations do so.)