On Some Idiosyncrasies Exhibited by the Plural of Compounds
On Some Idiosyncrasies Exhibited by the Plural of Compounds

Summary/Abstract: A substantial amount of research has been conducted on the subject of English compounding. In the vast majority of situations, compound nouns are made up of two juxtaposed stems. Their behaviour is primarily determined by the degree of fusion of the constituent elements, which, in turn, entails that a rule which will apply to all scenarios is difficult to devise. However, several groupings of compounds, be they endocentric, exocentric, appositional, etc., exhibit a degree of regularity. Generally, one member in the compound functions as a modifier, thus ascribing a specific feature to the other element, namely the head of the compound. As a result, the structure operates as a hyponym of the head since the modifier has constrained the category to which the head refers. The present study scrutinizes several semantic and pragmatic factors which qualify these (ir)regularities.

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