Proper-name nominal compounds in Swedish between syntax and lexicon

Abstract

This paper focuses on Swedish nominal compounds with a personal proper name as their first component (PropN-compounds), e.g. en Mozart+sonat ‘a Mozart sonata’ or Palme+mord-et ‘the Palme murder’ (‘Palme+murder-the’), and aims at showing that such compounds are truly situated between lexicon and syntax. Syntactic considerations are relevant for PropN-compounds for at least the following reasons: a) since proper names themselves are often phrases rather than single words, the first part of PropN-compounds can be a phrase, including preand postposed attributes of varying complexity, coordination and even definite suffixed articles on the head noun; b) PropNcompounds are often involved in competition with syntactic coding strategies, and c) the proper-names in PropN-compounds are occasionally accessible for external anaphora. Lexical considerations are also relevant for PropN-compounds: a) PropN-compounding provides a systematic way of creating new lexical items, with many PropN-compounds fully conventionalized or on their way to full conventionalization; b) various structural properties of PropNcompounds (e.g. recursion, the use of proper names with attributes or of conjoined proper names as the non-head component) are sensitive to the “lexicalization degree” of the involved elements, where lexicalization primarily refers to their recognition as expressions for unitary concepts. It is suggested that some of the theoretical claims on the morphology of compounding are not particularly relevant for PropN-compounds, since their defining property is that they are based on personal proper names or on what is conceived of as a personal proper name. These expressions can have quite different structural properties ranging from single simplex words to phrases, but all these structures (including certain types of close appositional structures) are allowed to function as the first-most component in compounds as long as they are recognized as a name for a unique referent – a person or a group of persons. PropNcompounds in Swedish are simply right-headed nominal compounds in which the first slot is occupied by any expression that is recognized as a personal proper name (with the marginal exception of expressions with a preposed syntactic determiner).

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