Phrasal vs. morphological compounds: Insights from Modern Greek and Turkish

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, we compare Modern Greek nominal compounds to their Turkish counterparts and reveal that Modern Greek nominal compounds under investigation are morphological while Turkish ones are syntactically built. Based on this, we offer an explanation for the availability of phrasal compounds in Turkish but not in Modern Greek: phrase-level items can be involved in syntactic compounds, but not in morphological compounds involving solely morphological items. The study reveals that the locus of compound formation is not confined to a single module both cross-linguistically and within a language, but the locus of a specific type of compound in a language entails whether or not phrasal compounds with the same compound structure can also occur in that specific language.