In recent years theoretical linguistics has shown increased interest in compounds, a phenomenon which can be used as a testing ground for different models of grammar because it lies at the interface of different linguistic components: phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. The focus of this workshop is a particularly interesting type of compound which has been largely neglected in the literature: phrasal compounds, illustrated by the German "ein Lass-mich-in-Ruhe-Blick" and its English counterpart "a leave-me-alone-look". This type of compound has mixed grammatical properties of both phrases and one-word lexemes.
This award will support U.S. participation in an international workshop funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, to be held at the University of Mannheim, Germany, in June, 2013. Workshop participants will discuss phrasal compounds from a theoretical and cross-linguistic perspective. The workshop will facilitate the development of a new long-term international collaboration between researchers at Syracuse University and the University of Mannheim. The core collaboration and the resulting research road map will catalyze further work on typologically diverse languages: Japanese, Turkish and additional Turkic languages, and other Altaic languages such as Mongolian, in addition to the languages and language families addressed by the workshop presentations: German and Germanic, Italian and other Romance languages, as well as Modern Greek.
The project Workshop on phrasal compounds from a typological and theoretical perspective supported the development of a new international collaboration between Professor Jaklin Kornfilt of Syracuse University and Professor Carola Trips of the University of Mannheim. These scholars are linguists who study the syntax and morphology (i.e. the sentence structure and word structure) of languages; Professor Kornfilt is specialist of Turkish and the Turkic languages, with an interest in German and Germanic; Professor Trips specializes in German and Germanic and has also done work in historical linguistics. Over the past five or so years, a new area of linguistics inquiry has begun to emerge – the study of phrasal compounds, i.e. compounds parts of which are entire phrases, typically sentences. Regular compounds typically consist of two words, e.g. text + book, yielding textbook. Linguists view compounding as part of word formation, i.e. textbook is a new word derived from text and book. However, in phrasal compounds, e.g. in a "wait and see" mentality, and, even more strikingly, in a "let it happen" attitude, the first part of the compound is a sentence. Thus, a natural assumption to make would be that phrasal compounds should be analyzed in the syntactic component of linguistics, where the structures of phrases and sentences are studied, rather than in the component of word formation. Should, then, compounds be formed by both morphology and syntax, leading to a redundant linguistic model? Or can simple compounds and phrasal compounds be formed within the same linguistic component? Resolving such questions is thus important for linguistics at large, especially because compound formation is something all languages exhibit, and all languages have, as far as we are aware, simple as well as phrasal compounds. Since the limited work on this topic had previously been narrowly focused on essentially two languages, i.e. English and German, NSF (as well as DFG) support allowed these scholars to combine their expertise in a range of languages to identify phrasal compounds in Turkish, Turkic, German and Germanic, Italian and the Romance languages, as well as Modern Greek and Turkish in contrast. Following the one-month intensive research exchange in Germany, they convened a workshop at University of Mannheim attended by scholars from across Europe, with Professor Kornfilt as the sole participant from the USA. (Additional researchers from the USA were invited but could not participate). The workshop’s purpose was to develop an international research agenda on phrasal compounds, to continue pursuing the detailed issues identified at the workshop, as well as the general ones touched upon above. These efforts will also contribute to the protection of endangered languages (e.g. some of the Turkic languages are endangered).
