English covert compounds: between word-formation and lexical cohesion

Abstract

This article tackles the phenomenon whereby a full compound is introduced in a text and subsequently referred to only through its head. The latter is called a covert compound. For example: “the limited impact of government policy after 1905 in general and of the Stolypin land reform in particular. True, in the country as a whole the reform helped to reduce […]”. It is proposed that reform in this context is a compound which flies under the radar, since its actual referent is in fact land reform but, for various reasons, the non-head has been elided and only the head retained upon second mention. Our assumption is that on some occasions a compound will be introduced in a text and then repeated in full, while on others only the head will be repeated after the first mention. The postulate of this article is that ignoring covert compounds implies a limited view of compounding, and in turn of the lexicon. Its aim is thus to use corpus data to look into how a given concept initially named by a compound is referred to subsequently through a simplified lexical unit. The findings point to a high presence of open low-frequency non-lexicalized compounds among covert compounds and to a dominance of Object-orientation with the semantic roles Agent and Object.