Variation in the Translation Patterns of English ‘Noun + Noun’ Compounds in ESP: The Case of Engineering Students

‘Noun + Noun’ compounds are among the most common and productive structures in modern English. Due to their complexity and potential ambiguity, they represent a challenge for English language learners, especially if such compounds are generally untypical and unproductive in the learners’ mother tongue, as the case is with the Serbian. The aim of this research is to examine how engineering students understand and translate ‘N+N’ structures in the context of English for Specific Purposes, focusing on binominal compounds and compounds with more than two constituents. The research method is the analysis of a translation test from English to Serbian. The results show that students need to receive more input about the semantic and syntactic properties of these structures and develop learning strategies that would help them to fully comprehend this type of compounds and provide their correct translations, focusing on their meaning instead of form.

A parametric approach to the acquisition of syntax

Three case-studies, using longitudinal records of children's spontaneous speech, illustrate what happens when a child's syntax changes. The first, examining acquisition of English verb-particle constructions, shows a near-total absence of commission errors. The second, examining acquisition of prepositional questions in English or Spanish, shows that children (i) may go as long as 9 months producing both direct-object questions and declaratives with prepositional phrases, before first attempting a prepositional question; and (ii) at some point, abrubtly begin producing prepositional questions that are correctly formed for the target language. The third case study shows that in children acquiring English, the onset of verb-particle constructions occurs almost exactly when that child begins using novel noun-noun compounds. After a discussion of the implications for the nature of syntactic knowledge, and for the mechanisms by which it is acquired, two examples are presented of as-yet untested acquisitional predictions of parametric proposals in the syntax literature.

Jellybeans… or Jelly, Beans…? 5-6-year-olds can identify the prosody of compounds but not lists

Learning to use word versus phrase level prosody to identify compounds from lists is thought to be a protracted process, only acquired by 11 years (Vogel & Raimy, 2002). However, a recent study has shown that 5-year-olds can use prosodic cues other than stress for these two structures in production, at least for early-acquired noun-noun compounds (Yuen et al., 2021). This raises the question of whether children this age can also use naturally-produced prosody to identify noun-noun compounds from their list forms in comprehension. The results show that 5-6-year-olds (N = 28) can only identify compounds. Unlike adults, children as a group could not use boundary cues to identify lists and were significantly slower in their processing compared to adults. This suggests that the acquisition of word level prosody may precede the acquisition of phrase level prosody, i.e., some higher-level aspects of phrasal prosody may take longer to acquire.

Adjective–noun compounds in Mandarin: a study on productivity

In structuralist linguistics, compounds are argued not to constitute morphological categories, due to the absence of systematic form-meaning correspondences. This study investigates subsets of compounds for which systematic form-meaning correspondences are present: adjective–noun compounds in Mandarin. We show that there are substantial differences in the productivity of these compounds. One set of productivity measures (the count of types, the count of hapax legomena, and the estimated count of unseen types) reflect compounds’ profitability. By contrast, the category-conditioned degree of productivity is found to correlate with the internal semantic transparency of the words belonging to a morphological category. Greater semantic transparency, gauged by distributional semantics, predicts greater category-conditioned productivity. This dovetails well with the hypothesis that semantic transparency is a prerequisite for a word formation process to be productive.

The challenge of relational referents in early word extensions: Evidence from noun-noun compounds

Young children struggle more with mapping novel words onto relational referents (e.g., verbs) compared to non-relational referents (e.g., nouns). We present further evidence for this notion by investigating children's extensions of noun-noun compounds, which map onto combinations of non-relational referents, i.e., objects (e.g., baby and bottle for baby bottle), and relations (e.g., a bottle FOR babies). We tested two- to five-year-olds’ and adults’ generalisations of novel compounds composed of novel (e.g., kig donka) or familiar (e.g., star hat) nouns that were combined by one of two relations (e.g., donka that has a kig attached (=attachment relation) versus donka that stores a kig (=function relation)). Participants chose between a relational (shared relation) and a non-relational (same colour) match. Results showed a developmental shift from encoding non-relational aspects (colour) towards relations of compound referents, supporting the challenge of relational word referents. Also, attachment relations were more frequently encoded than function relations.

Noun Compounds in Photography

Compounding is considered to be the most productive device in coining new words in many languages, including English. Numerous studies have dealt with compounds in recent decades. However, in spite of a large number of works on compounds in the general language, few authors have dealt with compounds in specialized languages. We find studies on compounds in science and technology or architecture, just to mention a few. The present article focuses on compound nouns in photography, a field that has to date not been researched in this regard but is extremely rich and interesting. The aim of this study is to outline the types of noun compounds in photography and to illustrate the range of semantic relationships and morphosyntactic patterns that occur in coining new noun compounds in the photography lexis. In order to carry out the study, a corpus-based approach was followed. The data was gathered from professional photography blogs providing authentic up-to-date lexis. The results show that there is a large presence and variety of patterns of nouncompounds in photography, such as noun compounds made up of noun + noun (photo album, time-lapse, shutter speed), verb + noun (catchlight, burn tool, protect filter), adjective + noun (white balance, softbox, glowing filter) and phrase compounds (depth of focus, rule of thirds, pan and tilt).

Composizione-univerbazione? Le oscillazioni di grafia nei produttivi composti italiani a schema (N) VN sul materiale linguistico tratto da La Gazzetta dello Sport negli anni 2016—2020

Word-formation and compounding in Italian present many interesting challenges (classification of compounds, its interpretation and types of semantic relationship that may hold between the compound’s elements). This article attempts to examine a different one — the orthography of one productive compounding pattern in present-day Italian, that is Verb + Noun compounds. Various accounts of Verb + Noun ortography are reviewed, with special focus on the status of hyphenated words. In light of this data, the author focuces also on the problem of inclusion of compounds as multi-word units by dictionaries. The aim of this research is to contrast theoretical prescriptions with some data samples of Italian (Noun) Verb + Noun compounds drawn from La Gazzetta dello Sport (2016—2020). With this analysis the author wants to examine more in detail whether the use reflects what Italian grammarians claim about the Verb + Noun compounds ortography rules, because in various researches conducted in this field that aspect has often been neglected.

Compound words on the Jakarta post newspaper and Việtnam news newspaper

A newspaper has become the major news source around the world, either the printed or online newspaper. A newspaper provides many kinds of news and from different perspectives. Words in the newspaper play a significant role to deliver the information to the readers. The morpho-semantic study is needed to find out the uncommon words and their meaning in the newspaper. News in The Jakarta Post newspaper and Việt Nam News newspaper were analyzed, applying Hamawand’s (2001) compound categorization. Endocentric compound and exocentric compound by O’Grady et al (2016) are also being used in this study. The data were taken in a purposive sampling technique by observing eight news in the business column by The Jakarta Post and nine news in the economy column by Việt Nam News, taken from August 28, 2020, until September 4, 2020. Both newspapers contain distinctive compound words related to the economy that is still rarely known by people. From the total seventeen news, only a noun compound and adjective compound are found in the news, while the verb compound does not appear at all. The total of compound words found in the news is 25; there are 18 noun compounds and 7 adjective compounds found in the news. There are 16 endocentric compounds and 9 exocentric compounds found. The result shows that noun compounds and endocentric compounds appear more often than adjective compounds and exocentric compounds.