This paper focuses on Noun-Noun compounds (henceforth, NN compounds) in Spanish. More specifically, it is concerned with analyzing the semantic relations that hold between the head (which denotes a subtype of the whole compound) and the modifier (which provides specific information about that head) in Spanish NN compounds based on Jackendoff’s (2009, 2016) basic functions model.

Accounting for the meaning of compounds poses an interesting problem: on the one hand, the individual meanings of the elements forming the compound contribute to the meaning of the compound; on the other, there is a problem of identifying the implied semantic relations that hold between the two elements. For example, in pepperoni hat the individual meaning of pepperoni and hat is clear, but when they are combined in a compound, it is difficult to pick out a singular meaning since there are several possibilities (e.g. ‘hat that has pepperoni’, ‘hat that is similar to pepperoni’, ‘hat that is made from pepperoni’ etc.).

Identifying these implied semantic relations that exist between the two nouns is the aspect that this paper focuses on. One of the most recent frameworks that has been proposed to account for the semantic relations between the modifier and head in NN compounds is Jackendoff’s (2009, 2016) basic functions model within the Parallel Architecture framework. Jackendoff (2009) proposed that the semantic relation between the head and modifier can be established by using an external function F(X, Y) which is a representation of the meaning of the constituents making up the compound. For instance, taking the example pepperoni hat provided above, the meaning of ‘hat that has peperoni on it’ could be represented in the following way: [HAT₂ ^α; [HAVE (α, PEPPERONI₁ ON α)]]. Jackendoff identified thirteen basic functions to account for the meaning of NN compounds in English. At the same time, he posed questions concerning the cross-linguistic applicability of the model: he wondered whether this model could be applied to other languages and to what extent the basic functions that he proposed were particular to English. Therefore, the aim is to identify the basic functions that hold in Spanish NNs, and answer the following questions: are there any functions that are present in English, but not in Spanish, and vice versa? Also, which functions are more productive and which are less productive? Finding an answer to these questions will not only shed light on Jackendoff’s questions regarding the cross-linguistic applicability of his system, but will also allow us to determine whether the lack of creativity of NN compounds in Spanish correlates with their semantic inflexibility (i.e. low productivity of semantic relations). Our hypothesis is that only creative compounds can satisfy the interface condition imposed by the Principle of Generalized Modification (Snyder 2012, 2016) on the interpretation of well-formed compounds. In other words, this predicts that only those functional elements (i.e. the basic functions in our case) providing the semantic relation at the time of semantic composition that have proved creative will satisfy Generalized Modification.

In addition, given that the alternative creative structure for nominal compounding in Spanish is N-de-Ns (i.e. casa de campo ‘house of country’ > country house), it will be interesting to apply Jackendoff’s model to the semantic interpretation of N-de-N constructions. Since these constructions are very frequent and productive, if the thirteen basic function model can be applied to them, N-de-Ns are expected to show a wider range of semantic relations as opposed to NNs. Moreover, the fact that N-de-Ns constructions can be successfully interpreted by the basic function model would provide evidence that they should be treated as NN compounds semantically, because their meaning can be accounted for in the same way. And, if so, then we would have evidence for the claim by Nicoladis (2002) that in Romance languages prepositions in ‘N Prep N’ constructions are becoming linking elements and are not true prepositions.

In order to test these hypotheses and answer the questions raised, I have carried out an analysis of Spanish NN compounds and N-de-Ns that are already attested. The reason why this is important is because we first need to determine what relations bundle as creative and which ones do not. And based on these results we should be able to generalize or predict that when coining new compounds, only those relations that have been marked as creative would be instantiated in the meaning of the novel items.

The items under study have been obtained from the Corpus del Español (Davies 2002–), the appendix in Compound Words in Spanish: Theory and History (Moyna 2011: 303–433), and various written sources such as articles and textbooks. I have created a database of 203 NNs and 203 N-de-Ns and analyzed them according to Jackendoff’s functions. In the following sections, I will provide the analysis, present the results, and discuss their implications for the predictions and questions outlined above.

This paper is organized into 7 sections including the introduction. Section 2 provides the theoretical background and an overview of the features of NN compounds in Spanish. Section 3 is concerned with the semantics of NN compounds and more specifically with Jackendoff’s model. Section 4 presents the research questions and hypotheses. Section 5 deals with the analysis of the data collected. Section 6 discusses the main findings and how they relate to the hypotheses and research questions formulated in section 4. Section 7 concludes the paper.

This section discusses the theoretical background necessary for understanding the semantics of NN compounds. It first focuses on outlining the characteristics of Spanish NN compounds by comparing them to NN compounds in English. Then, it provides a thorough overview of different approaches dealing with the meaning of NN compounds, which will allow to explain the hypotheses that the study is based on.

Despite the fact that NN compounds can be found in both English and Spanish, English NN compounds differ from Spanish NN compounds in two main areas: their creativity (Snyder 2012, 2016) and directionality. These syntactic properties have been widely discussed by Bauer (1983), Piera (1995), Snyder (1995, 2001, 2012, 2016) and Liceras and Diaz (2001), among others. A process is creative “if it is available for automatic, impromptu use whenever a new word is needed to fit the occasion” (Snyder 2016: 91). Creativity is often confounded with productivity which is concerned with the number of instances that an element is found in the language or listed in a dictionary. In this paper I will take productivity to mean the frequency with which a particular semantic relation is instantiated or expressed. Directionality covers the syntactic organization in terms of headedness: that is, which of the two nouns making up the compound is the semantic and categorial head and in which position the head is placed.

Contrary to Germanic languages like English, where the formation of endocentric NN compounds is utterly creative,1 this word formation strategy is not very common in Romance languages like Spanish. This difference led Snyder (1995, 2001) to formulate The Compounding Parameter (i.e. TCP), which Snyder (2012) later redefined. This new formulation is given in (1):

Generalized Modification is a principle that needs to be satisfied at the syntax-semantics interface. In other words, when the compound created in the syntax is transferred to the LF interface, the compound has to be able to semantically compose to render a suitable interpretation (William Snyder p.c.). There are two requirements: one of them is a hyponymy relation2 and the other is an available semantic relation established between the modifier and the head (by means of a functional head, e.g. Fábregas 2008, Di Sciullo 2009). The prediction this makes is twofold: if an [XY] is neither a type of X nor a type of Y the semantic composition will crash at LF; besides, if the semantic relation involved in the semantic composition of the compound is not active (i.e. “switched off” if we assume the availability of semantic relations is parametric), the composition will also crash.

Thus, Snyder (2012) divides languages as [+TCP] or [–TCP] regarding whether compounding is creative or not respectively. Moreover, Snyder (2012) acknowledges that the semantic content expressed in his definition of generalized modification as “stands in a pragmatically suitable relation to” (2012: 11) is vague because the relation that holds between the modifier and the head of an NN compound in [+TCP] languages is enormously flexible. Snyder (2012), however, does not propose a way to clarify this vagueness when determining the implied semantic relation. A possible way to account for the semantic relations that hold in NN compounds is applying Jackendoff’s (2009, 2016) basic function model that proposes thirteen basic functions to interpret the meaning of NN compounds. This model has been successfully applied to languages like English and Swedish which are [+TCP] and French which is [–TCP]. The former exhibit all or almost all of the functions Jackendoff proposes where the latter displays very few functions. Therefore, a plausible hypothesis is that [+TCP] languages allow a wide amount of semantic relations and therefore cause compounding to be a very creative process while [–TCP] do not. A question that is raised in this paper is whether this hypothesis is true for Spanish.

In addition to Snyder’s TCP, Piera’s (1995) Word Marker (i.e. WM) should be considered when analyzing compounds in languages such as English and Spanish. Piera acknowledged that English and Spanish NN compounds differ in two essential ways: English compounds are right-headed, whereas Spanish ones are left-headed (2) (head in bold); and English compounds are recursive, while Spanish ones are not (3):

Examples in (2) demonstrate that while the head of the English compound in (2a) is the right-hand element (e.g. man), the head of the Spanish compound is placed on the left (i.e. hombre). This means that directionality in Spanish is reversed compared to English. In terms of headedness, we can adopt Arnaud and Renner (2014: 2) terminology. In both English and Spanish the head corresponds to the semantic, categorial and morphological head: the semantic head is the entity that denotes the hyperonym (e.g. a “spider man” is type of man; a “hombre araña” is a type of hombre); the categorial head is the constituent whose word class determines the whole unit’s word category (in this case since both constituents are nouns, there is no controversy here); and the morphological head is the component undergoing inflection such as gender or number (i.e. spider men/woman; hombre-s/mujer araña). The modifier element specifies the meaning of the head by means of an implied semantic relation: so a spider man is ‘a man that has spider features’ and bears the basic function HAVE according to Jackendoff (2016).

Piera addresses the reason why recursive NN compounds in Spanish are ungrammatical: Spanish nouns have a Word Marker (i.e. WM) at the end, which may or may not be phonetically realized, and which bears grammatical information such as number or gender. English nouns, on the other hand, do not have this WM. This difference is illustrated in (4):

The ‘o’ in (4a) is the WM that distinguishes Spanish nouns from English ones. The presence of this WM forces a Spanish noun to have a double bracket to its left, which prevents the adjunction of another noun to it, given Piera’s (1995) Double Bracket Restriction, according to which “a double bracket at the edge of a word blocks adjunction of a word” (Piera 1995: 6) as shown in example (5):

Although Piera’s Double Bracket Restriction seems to account for the directionality of Spanish compounds as well as for the non-existence of recursive NN compounds in Spanish, it does not explain why compounds such as *mesa ventana (lit. “table window” > window table) should be ungrammatical. In fact, this compound shares the same internal structure as (5a). This can be seen in (6):

One reasonable hypothesis that can be proposed to account for the question why Spanish does not have NN compounds like mesa ventana is that at the syntax-semantics interface Generalized Modification is not satisfied: Spanish may not allow the realization of the semantic relation that should hold between the head (e.g. mesa) and the modifier (e.g. ventana) in such compounds leading to a crash at LF. That is, the ungrammaticality of such compounds may be due to semantic constraints rather than syntactic ones. More precisely, the number of semantic relations that underlies the meaning of NN compounds may be limited in Spanish, as opposed to languages like English. Thus, one reason for the restricted creativity of Spanish NN compounds may be their “semantic inflexibility”: the amount of productive semantic relations available at the syntax-semantics interface may be limited. One of the goals of this study is, precisely, to investigate whether NN compounds in Spanish do or do not allow the realization of all semantic relations that are attested in NN compounds in languages like English, and the frequency with which those relations are found, which may be two important factors causing the lack of creativity of such compounds.

As it was mentioned at the beginning of section 2, the central question that concerns the semantics of compounds is how the meaning of the compounds relates to the meaning of the parts. If we take a compound such as mushroom soup, we can break down the semantic content of the nouns into two parts. On the one hand, there is a problem of how the individual meaning of the elements forming the compound (mushroom and soup) contributes to the meaning of the compound; on the other, there is a problem of identifying the implied semantic relation that holds between the two elements: is it a resemblance relation (soup similar to mushroom)? Or is it a possessive one (soup has mushrooms)? or is it a compositional one (soup made from mushrooms)? Determining these implied semantic relations is one of the challenges that studies concerned with the semantics of compounding try to account for.

There have been many attempts to capture the implied semantic relation between the two nouns making up the compound. For instance, Lees’ (1960, 1970) attempt was based on proposing a set of underlying verbs which were deleted in the course of the derivation from a sentence to an NN. Downing (1977), however, proposed a finite set of semantic relations that can be used to account for the implied meaning of the compound and attempted to identify the semantic relations available between the head and modifier as well as any possible semantic constraints in the formation of NN compounds. Levi (1978) proposed a reduced number of predicates that can be used to establish the meaning of compounds as a whole, but as it has been argued her theory has some disadvantages. Allen (1978) introduced the importance of the lexicon: the meaning of an NN compound depends on the association that can be made between the semantic content of modifier and head which is determined by the information of the lexical entries encoded in the lexicon. However, due to the inability of these models to answer questions such as how the meaning of compounds is related to the meaning of the whole and what the status of compounds in the lexicon is, new theories and proposals have been proposed in recent years from various perspectives. In this paper, I focus on one particular framework in which the semantics of compounds is the central issue: Jackendoff’s (2009, 2016) basic functions model within the Parallel Architecture framework.

As mentioned above, the main goal of this paper is to identify the semantic relations that hold between the head and the modifier in Spanish NN compounds, based on Jackendoff’s (2009) basic functions model. By comparing the results obtained from Spanish with Jackendoff’s results from English, I hope to shed some light on the questions Jackendoff raised regarding the full set of basic functions and the universality of the model.4

A major question that this paper is concerned with is whether the lack of creativity can be understood in terms of few productive semantic relations (i.e. what was refered previously as “semantic inflexibility”). For instance, it has been argued by Marqueta-García (2017) that all compounds in Spanish can be reduced to a single semantic relation which she calls Identifying. Her main argument is that they can be paraphrased as como (‘like’): pez globo (‘globe fish’) ‘pez que es redondo como un globo’ (‘fish that is round like a globe’). If this is the case, then the Identifying relation would not be creative but it would be productive (i.e. all NN compounds in Spanish show this relation). So, in principle, one could then assume that [–productivity] and [–creativity] are not related in [–TCP] languages like Spanish and hypothesize the following:

Hypothesis A predicts that (i) there will be a small (if any) amount of semantic relations that will be instantiated with a certain frequency; and (ii) they will allow the existence of NN compounds in Spanish. However, the fact that some of these relations are productive should not entail creativity. In other words, this hypothesis predicts that few or (maybe) no semantic relations will be frequent and regularly attested as opposed to English, where it is argued that they are extremely productive and also creative. Nevertheless, this hypothesis by itself does not explain why compounding is not a creative process, potentially leading to the ungrammaticality of NN compounds, which is one of the ultimate goals of this paper. In fact, it would only predict that certain relations are repeatedly found in the data. That is why, I propose a competing hypothesis in (16):

(16) is along the lines of the TCP: one would expect few semantic relations to be productive. If this prediction is borne out, one could then blame the non-creativity of Spanish compounds on this low productivity of semantic relations. As a result, those relations that are productive, and thus creative, will satisfy Generalized Modification at the syntax-semantics interface; while unproductive semantic relations violate Generalized Modification in NN compounds. To put it differently, one needs to think about Generalized Modification as a kind of filter that can only see productive relations. This could provide a potential explanation for ungrammaticality of novel cases like mesa ventana (‘window table’).5

I need to clarify that, even though the semantic relations that will be underlying the two nouns may be limited, they may not be as restricted as suggested by Marqueta-García (2017). In fact, reducing all semantic relations to one may be too extreme given the existence of examples like gas ciudad (‘city gas’), or bandera pirata (‘pirate flag’) which are not suitable to fall under the underlying Identifying relation. What is more, the fact that a compound cannot be paraphrased by a particular predicate is one of the problems early transformational approaches like Levy (1978) or Lees (1960, 1970) fell into, especially taking into account that NN compounds can be promiscuous.

This question is very much related to another aim of the study, which is the establishment of a hierarchy of semantic relations expressed in Spanish NN compounds according to their productivity. That is, the idea is to find out whether there are some relations that are more productive than others, and whether there are utterly unproductive ones. Taking into account the unproductivity of NN compounds in Spanish, I believe that few semantic relations will be favored. If this is the case, it could be assumed that the more productive a relation is, the more creative it will be. Also, given what Rosenberg (2013) found in her study regarding PROTECT and KIND (they were not attested either in French structures or Swedish NNs, see footnote 3 for details), I expect that these two semantic relations will be extremely peripheral in the data. That said, this predicts that those semantic relations that belong to the unproductive block of the hierarchy will not satisfy the interpretive conditions to be met at the syntax-semantics interface and will lead to a crash.

In addition to this, I consider it important to apply Jackendoff’s model to Spanish N-de-N constructions as well, because they are very creative and productive in Spanish and are regarded as alternative constructions to NNs. This is why the semantic relations present in Spanish NN compounds (i.e. buque escuela ‘ship school’ = training ship) will be compared to those that could be attested in Spanish N-de-N constructions (i.e. buque de guerra ‘ship of war’ = war ship). Since the latter constructions are very creative in the language, I believe that they will exhibit a wider range of semantic relations. Thus, they are expected to behave like the mirror image of compounds. That is, I suppose that most of the basic functions proposed by Jackendoff will be applicable to them. If this turns out to be the case, the results will then strongly support the claim by Nicoladis (2002) about prepositions in the equivalent French structures (i.e. prepositions in these structures are becoming linking elements: they do not bear any meaning, but act as glue sticking the two nouns together), as it may show a pattern taking place in Romance languages. Such results would also confirm that N-de-Ns should be considered as “actual” compounds with the same status as NN compounds given their conceptual unity (Kornfeld 2009: 442). As a result, if these are compounds, they should also be subject to Generalized Modification at the syntax-semantics interface. A question that arises now is whether Hypothesis B is also applicable to them.

Overall, the results obtained may shed some light on the reasons why NN compounds are so peripheral in Spanish. In other words, are NN compounds uncommon in Spanish because they are semantically inflexible due to the limited set of productive semantic relations that hold between the head and modifier?

In order to provide an answer to the questions and the hypotheses formulated here, I have carried out an analysis of Spanish NN compounds that have been obtained from the Corpus del Español (Davies 2002–), the appendix in Compound Words in Spanish: Theory and History (Moyna 2011: 303–433), and various written sources such as journal articles and textbooks. The analysis is presented in the next section.

This section describes the methodology followed to collect NN compounds and N-de-Ns, focusing on the description of the sources and tools used to collect the data, as well as the procedure to classify the data. Then I turn to the analysis of the data in an attempt to answer the research questions formulated in section 4.

In section 4, I outlined two competing hypotheses that I labeled A and B and that will be repeated here in (39) and (40) respectively:

Hypothesis A was formulated on the basis of Marqueta-García’s (2017) work that there is only one semantic relation, i.e. Identifying, which is very productive because according to her all NN compounds have this relation underlyingly. But at the same time, this relation was not creative given that it neglected the creation of new impromptu items. Hypothesis B, on the contrary, predicted that productivity and creativity go hand in hand entailing that if a semantic relation is productive it should also be creative. The data and the analysis provided suggest that reducing all semantic relations to the one proposed by Marqueta-García (2017) is far from capturing the empirical facts. In fact, there seem to be a few of them that are possible semantic relations.

Thus, Hypothesis B seems more adequate. Considering the results obtained for NN compounds, only the following semantic relations are productive: resemblance/metaphorical, purpose (X functions as Y), location, and possession, functionally represented with SIMILAR, PF, X serves as Y, BE(AT/IN/ON), and HAVE. Thus, by hypothesis, these are the exclusive basic functions that should be creative when coining or interpreting novel NN compounds. In addition, this predicts that the other functions should not surface because this will lead to a crash at LF: Generalized Modification will not be able to provide an interpretation for these given that they are recognized by the Spanish grammar as not creative. Although at this time, no experimental results are available that can further support our hypothesis, I have data from a very small pilot study with my colleague Omar Barahona where 10 native Spanish speakers were asked to interpret the meaning of novel NN compounds.15 The results of this pilot indicate that the most used or preferred functions to render the meaning of novel NN compounds are SIMILAR, BE(AT/IN/ON), and X serves as Y.16 Crucially these results very much align with the functions that fall into the productive block, and thus can be taken to emphasize the optimality of the hypothesis that if a function is productive it can be creative. Therefore, this is important evidence that these functions are creative and satisfy Generalized Modification at LF during the semantic composition. However, and as a reviewer recommends, an experimental study should shed more light on this hypothesis which, though seems on the right track, as it stands now needs further empirical support.17

In addition to this, the purpose of establishing a hierarchy of semantic relations was to find out whether there are some relations that are more productive than others and whether there are utterly unproductive ones. The hierarchy for NNs in (38a) indicates what I have been claiming all along, and what also seems to be supported by the small pilot: the resemblance relation is the most creative one when compared to the availability of others. This is also in line with what was hinted in section 5 with respect to SIMILAR being the “default” relation. It is interesting, nevertheless, to note that N-de-Ns display a different hierarchy of creativity. A question that arises is why this is so. When answering this question one needs to consider that N-de-Ns differ from compounds in that all the possible schemata proposed for each of the functions are realized in Spanish N-de-Ns; and that some basic functions unattested in NNs are found in N-de-Ns, which already suggests divergence. The difference between the hierarchies may be due to a blocking effect (Aronoff 1976, Embick and Marantz 2008): this basically refers to the fact that languages will block the creation of one an item X if there is another item Y that means (or is) the same. If we think of an example, some compounds are unable to be expressed with a preposition de: balon reloj but *balón de reloj. William Snyder (p.c.) proposes that a possible hypothesis that could be formulated is the following: the semantic relation required for the target construction to satisfy the principle of Generalized Modification is only available in the NN form, which would block the surfacing of the prepositional alternative. This would go hand in hand with the hypothesis that the language user may be forced to coin or produce an NN compound when there is no other choice. And the same would apply in the other direction.

All in all, the results presented in this paper provide some hints on how to address the following research question: are NN compounds uncommon in Spanish because they are ‘semantically inflexible’? In other words, does the fact that there is a limited set of relations that are productive influence the grammatical creativity of these constructions in the language? “Yes” seems to be the answer towards which we have been driven. Considering that only a few semantic relations are available, it is obvious that not every desired concept that, in languages like English, can be expressed with an NN compound is possible to be captured with an NN compound in Spanish. In fact, the gaps created by the NN compound paradigm, which are quite significant, are to be filled by N-de-N constructions. Nevertheless, we should not forget that there seems to be a current tendency for the two formal structures to be merged into a single structure (i.e, NN compounds) due to the ongoing process of N-de-Ns losing de. The existence of cases such as telaraña (‘cobweb’) or coche diesel (‘diesel car’) demonstrates that the preposition de is dispensable. These were formerly N-de-Ns (tela de araña and coche de diesel respectively), but have now become NNs because the preposition is no longer used with them. The existence of these examples as well as the possibility to analyze N-de-Ns as nominal compounds in Spanish provides strong evidence for Nicoladis’ (2002) claim that prepositions are linking elements in these structures in Romance languages. Furthermore, it is very likely that de will disappear from Spanish N-de-Ns in the future, which would constitute an ultimate confirmation of the claim that N-de-Ns are an alternative type of nominal compounds in languages like Spanish or French.

This paper has been concerned with analyzing the semantic relations that hold in NN compounds in Spanish based on Jackendoff’s (2009, 2016) basic functions model. But more importantly, it has provided an analysis of why NN compounds in Spanish are not creative. The analysis of the data has led to the following conclusions.

The model proposed by Jackendoff can be successfully applied to Spanish NN compounds as almost all basic functions are (at least) attested. In this paper, I have shown that Spanish NN compounds do not realize all of the functions proposed for English either. More specifically, functions KIND, CLASSIFY, MADE FROM and PROTECT are not present in Spanish NNs. Therefore, the full set of functions as developed in Jackendoff’s model seems particular to English, while only a subset of functions is present in the four languages investigated thus far. And this fact, i.e. that languages differ with respect to the basic functions they allow, has shed some light on Jackendoff’s concern about the universality of his model. However, given that there seems to be variation with respect to the functions that the languages allow, we still need to identify what the most repeated or common set of functions is possible cross-linguistically. Therefore, in order to provide evidence for this question, data from various languages should be gathered.

The most important finding, nevertheless, is the fact that only those functions that are productive are also creative. Being creative, therefore entails being able to successfully create and interpret novel compounds. This explains why some NN compounds are non-licitly formed in Spanish: they bear non-productive (and thus non-creative) basic functions underlyingly, leading to a violation of the LF filter in charge of interpreting the structure. Although the results seem promising, new and more data should be gathered by means of experimental tasks. Only this way my hypothesis can be strengthened. But this is a good start given that now we have a better, or at least clearer, idea of why the coining or interpretation of NN compounds can be constrained, which to my knowledge had never been sketched before.