A Minimalist Approach to Doubly Compounded Synthetic Compounds

This paper addresses the difficulties arising in relation to what is called in minimalist syntax “doubly compounded synthetic compounds” within the framework of generative linguistics and offers an account of how the hierarchical structure of compounds is built with the process of merge. Specifically, the labelling theory developed by Chomsky is adopted. Doubly compounded synthetic compounds are composed of more than two lexemes and are divided into two types. One type involves a head noun derived from ditransitive verbs, as in shelf book putter, and the other type involves a head noun originating from transitive verbs, as in garage car keeper. Lieber finds doubly compounded synthetic compounds unacceptable, suggesting that synthetic compounding differs in multi-constituent compounding from attributive and coordinative compounding, since attributive and coordinative compounds are possible, as evidenced by examples from English such as kitchen towel rack (the attributive type) and Japanese such as shun-ka-shuu-too ‘lit. spring-summer-autumn-winter’ (the coordinative type). One question to be addressed is thus how to account for these differences. Moreover, some native speakers of English, in contrast to Lieber, find doubly compounded synthetic compounds with transitive verbs acceptable. This raises the second question of why there is variation in native speakers’ grammatical judgments concerning doubly compounded synthetic compounds with transitive verbs. This paper is an attempt at answering these two questions under the labelling theory. It is proposed that doubly compounded synthetic compounds related to ditransitive verbs fail to be labelled and are thus always ungrammatical, while the computational efficiency affects the acceptability of doubly compounded synthetic compounds with transitive verbs.