Constraints on Multiple Coordinative Compounding with Denominal Adjectives in Polish

This paper offers a quantitative and qualitative analysis of multiple coordinate adjectival compounds gathered from the National Corpus of Polish. It focuses on compounds with denominal adjectives, which are both productive and recursive. As expected, compounds involving three members far outnumber structures made up of four constituents. However, examples of compounds where the number of constituents exceeds five are also provided. The semantic, morphosyntactic and pragmatic constraints on their formation are discussed. It is demonstrated that, in line with the general constraints formulated with respect to coordinative compounding, the conjoined units are of the same category and are reversible. However, it transpires that adjectives in a multiple coordinate compound should belong not only to the same category, but also subcategory, i.e. subsective relational adjectives or intersective qualitative adjectives, with the former vastly outnumbering the latter. It is also possible to identify the semantic domains in which this pattern is particularly productive and some tendencies in the morphological make-up of compound members.