Combining words in the brain: The processing of compound words Introduction to the special issue

摘要

Why devote special attention to compound words? Compound words are not marginal linguistic elements of the lexicon: They reflect very important processes, and they are interesting in several respects. Combining words to obtain another word is, undeniably, a fundamental ability of our minds.It has been argued that compounding was one of the first processes to appear when language first developed: Jackendoff (2002), for example, has claimed that compounds may indeed be "pro-tolinguistic fossils" from which more complex linguistic structures have developed. Compound words imply specific syntactic processes; in terms of the minimalist programme (Chomsky, 2001) they may be seen (Mukai, 2013) as the result of a simple instance of "merge", one of the basic operations when two syntactic objects are combined to form a new syntactic unit. Compounds are indeed very interesting linguistic elements because composition is a very productive way to increase the size of the vocabulary.