대한언어학회 전자저널

Lee, Saeng-Keun. (2016). The Use of Regular Plural Modifiers within English Noun Compounds. The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal, 24(4), 375-393. The aim of this paper is to answer the question: what motivates the regular plural to appear within compounds? The paper basically supports Alegre and Gordons (1999) account that the appearance of the regular plural within compounds is conditioned on the heterogeneous reading of the regular plural. They argued that the noun modifier can license the regular plural if its meaning refers to different kinds rather than individuals. However, their argument is problematic in that it can't explain why the meaning of 'heterogeneity' is not always motivated. Thus the paper argues that other factors are involved, as well. All the factors are related to the semantic nature of the lexical item that occurs in the modifier position. Four categories of ambiguity are discussed: type/token ambiguity, count/mass ambiguity, text/object ambiguity, and adjective/noun ambiguity. This paper demonstrates through the examples taken from Google Corpus that compounds containing lexical items with these kinds of ambiguity accept the regular plural in compounds.

# 합성어(compound) # 규칙 복수명사(regular plural) # 이질성(heterogeneity) # 중의성(ambiguity) # 유형(type) # 개체(token)

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