SYNTACTIC AND SEMANTIC FACTORS BEHIND HEAD TRANSPARENCY IN ENGLISH COMPOUNDS

抄録

This paper deals with the head transparency that is exemplified by the following compounds: the healing-time of all ills (Boase-Beier (1987)) and a guidebook to modern linguistics (Namiki (1985)). Their right-hand constituents are “transparent” in that the left-hand constituents ignore them and license the PPs, contradicting the Right-Hand Head Rule. Naya (2016, 2017) syntactically analyzes healing-time-type compounds by arguing that only semi-lexical nouns can be transparent. However, this analysis cannot be applied to guidebook-type compounds. Clarifying the semantic relation between the constituents of the guidebook-type, this paper proposes that the head can also be transparent when it represents a part of the lexical meaning of the non-head. Accordingly, head transparency in compounds can stem from these two different factors.