Coordination in Compounds

Abstract

Compounds are generally divided in those that involve a dependency (subordinate and attributive) relation of one constituent upon the other and those where there is coordination, for which there is much controversy on delimiting the exact borders. This article offers an overview of compounds belonging to the second type, for which the term ‘coordinative’ is adopted, as more general and neutral, drawn from a wide range of terms that have been proposed in the literature. It attempts to provide a definition on the basis of structural and semantic criteria, describes the major features of coordinative compounds and discusses crucial issues that play a significant role to their formation and meaning, such as those of headedness, the order of constituents, and compositionality. Showing that languages vary with respect to the frequency and types of coordinative compounds, being unclear in which way these constructions are distributed and used cross-linguistically, it tries to give a classification with extensive exemplification from genetically and typologically diverse languages.