“Compounding in Spanish”

KORNFELD, LAURA

The Oxford Handbook of Compounding

Oxford University Press

Lugar: Oxford ; Año: 2008; p. 436 - 452

This chapter offers a short review of the characteristics of compounding in Spanish, presenting not only the main patterns of compounds but also the empirical and theoretical problems they pose for the literature on Spanish morphology. The main types of Spanish compounds are presented observing their internal structure and analyzing the formal relations between their constituents. We expect to pose the problems that compounds would cause to a strict lexicalist perspective of grammar (such as DiSciullo & Williams 1987), which has prevailed in the description of Spanish morphology. In our view, the problems in the analysis of many properties of compounds have their origin in the attempt to keep some premises of the lexicalist approach “untouched”. We claim that these premises being false, they condition a wrong analysis of the phenomena they are meant to describe. The present chapter intends to change this tendency by proposing a new direction to re-examine the data from a critical point of view.