1 Chapter 1. Introduction: status and definition of compounding ...

in (20) in order to account for the quasi-syntactic elaborations in (4) (e.g. health and
welfare fund), and what is their status vis-a-vis morphology, syntax, and protolanguage?
Other traditional questions have been answered by the present account, for example why
the possible relations between N1 and N2 are so varied yet not altogether wild; and precisely how
the meanings of the two nouns contribute to the meaning of the compound. Above all, because
the Parallel Architecture liberates the generative capacity of semantics from that of syntax, it has
been possible to give a semantically-based account of compounds that is sufficiently formal to
see what is going on, while keeping the syntax as absolutely simple as it looks.
Notes
1. This study is based on a corpus of approximately 2500 compounds. About half of these were
collected by students in my Semantics course at Brandeis University in spring 1997. I wish to
thank Erica Goldman, Joy Budewig, and Kristen Lauer for their help in organizing of this
material. The corpus also includes many examples from the literature, in particular Lees's (1960)
corpus, as well as about 400 examples from random issues of the Boston Globe and The Nation.
I am grateful to James Pustejovsky for much useful discussion; to him and Joan Maling, Federica
Busa, Hildy Dvorak, and Dan Dvorak for further examples; and to Nigel Love, Herbert Brekle,
Christian Bassac, Geert Booij, Peter Culicover, Susan Olsen, Biljana Mišić Ilić, and Shelly
Lieber for comments on earlier versions of this article.
2. As pointed out by some of the commentators on Klein and Perdue's paper in the same issue of
Second Language Research, some of the word order effects may be artifacts of the range of
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