Italian V+N compounds, inflectional features and conceptual structure

Abstract

Italian V+N compounds, such as portalettere ‘mailman’, apriscatole ‘can opener’ and spartineve ‘snow plough’ are exocentric and denote an Agent or an Instrument. Their morphological structure is intensively discussed and has raised many controversies. In this paper, we focus on the inflectional features Number, Gender and the Thematic Role the compound refers to (Agent or Instrument). We argue that the assignment of these features is conditioned by conceptual structure. Thus the morphological building of these compounds has to interact not only with lexical semantics but also with the independent tier of conceptual structure in a systematic way. We provide an analysis of this interaction in terms of a two level semantics with indices.