Two types of phrasal compound in cinyanja.

Abstract

Phrasal compounds such as two-for-the-price-of-one sales pose problems for linguistic theories because they behave like words, but clearly include syntactic phrases. The main aim of this thesis is to analyse two types of phrasal compounds in Cinyanja, the verb-noun (VN)-compounds such as cigona-mubawa, 'drunk' (lit. 'it sleeps-in-bar') and associative (Assc)-compounds such as njinga ya moto, 'motorbike' (lit. 'bicycle of fire'). I argue that these two types of compounds differ in whether or not the phrasal parts inside the compounds are accessible to syntactic rules, i.e. whether or not they are subject to the Lexical Integrity Hypothesis. I show that the phrasal part of VN-compounds obeys Lexical Integrity and is not accessible to syntactic rules such as modification, extraction, or gapping. From this, I conclude that VN-compounds are formed by a process called reification (Harley, 2009), where a phrasal structure is reanalysed as a simple root. In contrast, the phrasal parts inside Assccompounds are accessible to syntactic rules such as pronominalisation, modification and gapping, in violation of Lexical Integrity. I, therefore, analyse the Assc-compounds as (partly transparent) phrasal idioms. My analysis is based on previous work by Carstens (1991, 2008, 2018) on the syntax of Bantu noun phrases, Harley’s (2009) analysis of phrasal compounds in the Distributed Morphology framework, and Jackendoff’s (1997) theory of lexical licensing, as applied to phrasal idioms. My results inform our understanding of the processes of compound formation as well as the analysis and lexical representation of phrasal idioms.