Categorizing compounds in Spanish

Abstract

The main aim of this paper is to present a proposal of compound categorization from syntactic features. After a brief presentation of both semantic and formal approaches to categorization, we will exemplify the functional projections (i.e. gender) whose presence or absence determines the semantic and distributional characteristics of each compound pattern. We will try to show that, on the one hand, there exists category-specific behaviour inside compounds, although the referred specificity is no necessarily expressed morphologically. On the other hand, we will maintain that there exists a bigger amount of functional structure and grammatical relationships than traditionally observed, especially regarding compound modifiers.