The architecture of absence: How nominal and clausal grounding illuminate profiling verb-noun compounds

• A new model unifies cognitive-constructional grammar with grounding theory. • Mandarin and English exhibit a typological split in verb-noun compound processing. • Metonymy and transparency modulate grounding asymmetrically across languages. • Exocentric compounds are redefined as systematic cognitive anchoring. • L2 learners exhibit L1 transfer without full convergence. This study investigates the cognitive and constructional mechanisms underlying exocentric verb-noun compounds in English and Mandarin, addressing gaps in prior research that predominantly focused on structural properties whilst neglecting cross-linguistic cognitive processes. Integrating Langacker’s grounding theory with Construction Grammar, the study employs a paraphrasing test with 120 participants (including native English and Mandarin speakers, and Chinese L2 learners of English) to analyse how semantic properties (including cognitive strategies, semantic roles, transparency and frequency) map onto grounding strategies (nominal, clausal, mixed). The results reveal a fundamental typological divergence. English relies predominantly on mixed and nominal grounding, reflecting its syntactic approach to reference management. In contrast, Mandarin exhibits a preference for mixed and clausal grounding, with a marked dispreference for nominal strategies. This indicates that English employs grammatical means to promote nominalisation, whereas Mandarin preserves dynamic, relationally rich representations even in highly conventionalised compounds. Furthermore, the influence of cognitive strategies, semantic roles, transparency and frequency is systematically modulated by language-specific constraints. Our findings also uncover an asymmetric cross-linguistic influence in bilingual processing. These results indicate that whilst underlying cognitive mechanisms are universal, their linguistic representations are constrained by the typological characteristics of each language. This study provides a unified Cognitive-Constructional Model for the description of profiling verb-noun compounds.