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date: 25 January 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter raises the following theoretical questions: why are compounds a part of human language? How do their properties follow from the human computational system (CHL)? How do they satisfy the interface legibility conditions? These questions are addressed from the viewpoint of Asymmetry Theory. It is argued that compounds are a part of human language because they are derived by the operations of CHL, while they satisfy the interface interpretability condition in ways which phrases and sentences do not. The chapter is organized as follows. First, it discusses the asymmetries observed in the domain of English compounds and relates them to the ones observed in the domain of affixed forms. Second, the chapter shows how compounds are derived in Asymmetry Theory. Finally, it considers how they satisfy the Interface Interpretability Condition and bring to the fore recent experimental results on compound processing.

Keywords: English compounds, human computational system, affixed forms, Asymmetry Theory, Interface Interpretability Condition, compound processing

Anna Maria Di Sciullo

Anna Maria Di Sciullo is the Principal Investigator of a major collaborative research initiative on Interface Asymmetries and the Cognitive System. Her work on asymmetry led her to be nominated Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1999. She has published two MIT Press monographs on morphology. She has also published papers and edited books on conigurations, UG and the external systems, projections and interface conditions, asymmetry in grammar, biolinguistic investigations, and the biolinguistic approach to language evolution and variation. Her work is supported in part by funding from the SSHRC to the MCRI on Interface Asymmetries and the Cognitive System, and by a grant from the FQRSC for research on Dynamic Interfaces at the University of Quebec at Montreal.

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