The Oxford handbook of compounding (review)

All of the volumes of the Oxford University Press handbooks series until now have dealt with broad issues such as comparative syntax, cognitive linguistics, applied linguistics, and computational linguistics. The present volume is different; it focuses on a specific linguistic phenomenon—compounding. What makes compounding worthy of an entire volume as part of a series that aims to offer a critical survey of current thinking and knowledge in a particular field? Can compounding be regarded as a field? In a way, compounding is a very special linguistic phenomenon. It could be regarded as language in a nutshell. It is a lexical process, generating new lexical items, but it is productive, creating new units from existing words. It is also syntactic: it is recursive, and its output has some (albeit simple) hierarchical structure. It is also widespread in the languages of the world, yet different languages can exhibit different types of compounding. It is old (prevalent in ancient languages, e.g. Sanskrit), yet constantly changing within and across languages. This multifaceted nature of compounds presents interesting challenges to the speaker of a language, to the child acquiring a language, and to the linguist trying to account for compounds and compounding within a specific theory. It is fortuitous that the publisher decided to devote a volume to compounding.

The editors' purpose was to give a panoramic view of compounding from both theoretical and typological points of view. They begin the first paragraph of their introduction with the Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant, pointing out that the study of compounds resembles the attempt of the six blind men to develop a theory of 'elephanthood' on the basis of limited perception on the part of each one. In the case of compounding, each researcher or theory has a restricted view of the phenomenon, and each tries to construct a comprehensive theory on the basis of this limited view. Yet the task of linguists might be even more complicated than that of the blind men, as the editors suggest in the introduction. The blind men have a grasp on the entity that they are trying to describe. The linguists, by contrast, are not even sure that there is an elephant, since it is impossible to arrive at a full-proof definition of compounds in one language, let alone a general definition that can be applied crosslinguistically. Therefore, the main purpose of the volume is to convince the readers that there really is an elephant: 'We may still be blind, but we're pretty sure we're not delusional' (18). Where we get hold of the elephant depends on the specific theory that we adopt, and also on the specific language that we study. The editors attempted to present a variety of both theoretical points of view (presented in the first part of the book) and languages and language families (in the second part).

Part 1 consists of a selection of theoretical approaches to compounding. Alongside generative approaches, there are others, some of which the readers may be less familiar with. Despite their variability, several issues recur in many of these chapters, among them the issue of defining a compound and distinguishing it from phrases, affixed words, and idioms; the question of whether these distinctions are clear-cut or gradient; the productivity versus conventionalization of compounds; and the characterization of the relationship between the members of a compound (both structural and semantic).

The question of distinguishing compounds from other linguistic entities is dealt with in a few chapters. In Ch. 2, 'Compounding and idiomatology', STANISLAV KAVKA focuses on the noncompositionality of compounds, a feature they share with other idiomatic expressions in the language. Compounds, like other idiomatic expressions, may be more or less compositional, thus allowing for both the creative-generative characteristics of compounds and their idiomaticity. Amain issue in the lexicalist tradition within the generative approach is distinguishing between compounds and phrases, discussed in Ch. 9, 'Compounding and lexicalism' by...