| الوصف: |
This study examines aspects of compounds in Modern Standard Arabic (henceforth, MSA), since this area has not been investigated too much by researchers who is interested in the morphology of MSA. To this end, 1,017 MSA compounds were collected from different original sources (newspapers articles, magazines, novels, media, and poems). The data were analysed using a two-dimensional model, one of which is classificatory, based on Scalise and Bisetto’s taxonomy (2009), while the other is analytical, based on Altakhaineh’s work (2017). I used the analytical dimension to distinguish compounds in MSA from other structures using two criteria: adjacency and referentiality. The first classificatory dimension offers various categories such as subordinative, attributive, coordinative, endocentric, and exocentric, which are long established in the literature. In addition to the MSA data, I have also included examples of Modern Greek compounding (henceforth, Greek) found in the literature (e.g., Ralli 2013). The purpose of the Greek examples was not to convey a complete comparative study between MSA and Greek compounding, but to use them as a standard of comparison to highlight the properties of the MSA compounds because they are not genetically or typologically related. The frequency of MSA compounds is analysed statistically as well as by providing explanations and justification for the frequency of each category and subcategory. It is hypothesised that N N compounds are the most productive type of compounding in MSA; the results confirmed this hypothesis, as it was found that N N endocentric subordinative compounds were the most frequent type in the corpus. The frequency of this type of headed compound is due to the fact that it is more conventional or unmarked. This means that the central meaning of the compound is carried by the head. It was also found that certain types of compounds, namely attributive and coordinative, are less productive because they are marked or unheaded. Accordingly, they are more difficult to ... |