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John Cowan, On 29/09/2012 18:53:
And Rosta scripsit:Why? Compounds are stems containing more than one root. No other rules have been proposed; and I propose that there be no other rules.1) Is bdfg- a compound of bdf- and dfg-? It certainly contains both of them.
Compounds are concatenations of roots...
2) Does CC- count as a root for this purpose?
Yes.
Because if so, you cannot tell if bcdfg- is bc- dfg- or bcd- fg-, and for bcdfgj- it's even worse: you don't know if there are two roots or three.
That's right. Because compounds haveonly partly compositional meaning (-- if fully compositional, you wouldn't need to merge the component stems into one), the component roots serve a merely mnemonic function.
3) If there are to be no rules for dissecting or interpreting compounds, why bother to talk of compounds? Just say that roots can be arbitrarily long and the meaning of each is to be found in the dictionary, as in Classical Yiklamu, which has one arbitrarily chosen root for every one of the 90,000 WordNet synsets.
The reason for bothering to talk of compounds is the same as for natlangs: there's a semicompositional patterning of form and meaning. But I agree that the grammar needn't know about compounds -- the compound analysis would just be part of the form--meaning patternings across stems. --And.