Article,
Recursive compounds
Word Structure, 1 (2): 178--198 (2009)
Abstract
I propose a structure for recursive compounds in Japanese, English and Mainland Scandinavian within the frameworks of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2001) and Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993). Within the proposed theory, Collins’ (2002) definition of head is used: a head is a category which has one or more unsaturated features. Secondly, it is assumed that discharging a theta-feature from a simple nominal is also possible, since nouns are predicates (Higginbotham 1985) and an undischarged theta-feature counts as an unsaturated feature. In addition, the non-head of a compound is argued to be a root without word class features.
