Noun–noun compounds for fictive food products: Experimenting in the borderzone of semantics and pragmatics

Abstract

We performed a set of experiments dealing with the interpretation of novel Place–Food noun–noun compounds (NNCs) denoting fictive food products, in Danish. These were used in order to address concerns of linguistic theory, in particular the interrelation between semantics and pragmatics, psycholinguistics—investigating the role of sentential context for the interpretation of noun–noun compounds, and consumer oriented food labeling research. In the first experiment, a significant proportion of the novel NNCs was found to have a pre-contextually biased interpretation, in the majority of the cases conforming to what is usually considered the “default” interpretation for the studied type of compounds: FOOD ORIGINATING IN PLACE. In a subsequent experiment, this was however found to be easily overturned when sentential context supported what was initially found to be the least preferred interpretation. This contrasts with previous research comparing the role of such context on conventional NNCs. This suggests a qualitative difference between novel pre-contextually biased NNCs and conventional NNCs, and has implications for the semantics–pragmatics boundary, which we discuss. Furthermore, the three types of interpretations offered to the participants: ORIGINATING IN, RECIPE FROM and REMINDS OF, were shown to form an implicational hierarchy, which could explain the “asymmetric” preferences attributed to them by the participants in the experiments.