On the interplay of facts and theory

Abstract

This paper examines the data on which theoretical treatments of synthetic compounding in English have typically been based against data culled from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and argues that many claims made in the literature are inaccurate. Claims about the unacceptability of external arguments as the first elements of synthetic compounds, the obligatory transitive interpretation of compounds like tomato growing, the absence of achievement verbs in -ing synthetic compounds, the inability of -ing synthetics to be pluralized, the absence of eventive readings in synthetics, among others are falsified. The paper then proposes a set of generalizations more consistent with the corpus data and shows that the lexical semantic framework of Lieber (2004) is capable of accounting for the facts.

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