Co-Compounds and Natural Coordination

Bernhard Wälchli

Jun 2005 · Oxford University Press

About this ebook

This book presents a typological survey and analysis of the co-compound construction. This understudied phenomenon is essentially a compound whose meaning is the result of coordinating the meanings of its components, as when in some varieties of English 'father-mother' denotes 'parents'. During the course of the book Dr Wälchi examines and discusses topics of great theoretical and linguistic interest. These include the notion of word, markedness, the syntax and semantics of coordination, grammaticalization, lexical semantics, the distinction between compounding and phrase formation, and the constructional meanings languages can deploy. The book makes many observations and points about typology and areal features and includes a wealth of unfamiliar data. It will be invaluable for typologists and of considerable interest to a variety of specialists including lexicologists, morphologists, construction grammarians, cognitive linguists, semanticists, field linguists, and syntacticians.

About the author

Bernhard Wälchli received his master's degree in Slavic and Baltic studies at the University of Bern in 1997 and his Ph.D. in General Linguistics at Stockholm University in 2003. After completing research at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and the University of Konstanz, he returned to the University of Bern, where he is now a Swiss National Science Foundation Professor. His publications include papers on the typology of motion events, the repetitive, modality, and areal phenomena in the Circum-Baltic languages. He is co-editor of New Challenges in Typology (Mouton de Gruyter, 2007) and has taught at the universities of Bern, Konstanz, Stockholm, and Zürich. His current research includes work on primary-data typology (especially lexical typology and areal typology of motion events), the structure of the lexicon, and Baltic linguistics.