The Conceptual Relationships in N+N Compounds in Arabic Compared to English

Abstract

The current study investigates the semantic or conceptual relations that exist between two compound elements in Arabic based on the theoretical framework of Conceptual Semantics and a modified version of Parallel Architecture called Relational Morphology (RM). It also explores the similarities and/or differences between these relations and those identified by Jackendoff pertaining to English compounds. To this end, a corpus of Arabic compounds was collected and analysed to identify the type of conceptual basis on which both lexicalised and novel compounds are formed in Arabic. The analysis revealed that all conceptual relations found between elements of English compounds can also be found in Arabic, yet the direction of the head was different in the latter. The analysis also demonstrated that Arabic compounds exhibit other types of conceptual relations which were not mentioned by Jackendoff. It is suggested that both regular stored lexicalised compounds that have idiosyncratic interpretations and novel compounds (with the majority being formed based on Synthetic Genitive Construction) can be reconciled under the approach of Relational Morphology, as they can be generated by the same compound schema.

Keywords

• conceptual semantics
• relational morphology
• compounds
• Arabic
• English