On Interpreting ‘Peninsula’ and the Japanese 半島 ‘Half-Island’

Abstract

People interpret unfamiliar compounds by combining the component concepts into a new, complex concept. When the constituents have foreign roots, as happens in English neoclassical compounds and in Japanese words borrowed from Chinese, interpreters must first assign a semantic gloss to each component. The decoding of peninsula and 半島 follows such a pattern. But whilst construing and processing peninsula and the Latin paene īnsula as ‘almost island’ is relatively simple, inferring the denotation of 半島 is more complicated because gloss assignment yields the opaque ‘half-island’. In the end, though, the interpretative process succeeds in this case as well, thanks to world-knowledge validation, and allows interpreters to understand that ‘half-islands’ are not islands at all.