Keywords: morphological theory, inflection, derivation, compounding, Icelandic

The purpose of this article is to explore the interrelations between compound types in Icelandic, with special emphasis on compounds with “inflected” (or genitive) first part. Icelandic grammars traditionally distinguish between three kinds of compounds:

(1)
a. Stem compounds, where the first part looks like a bare stem. Example húsbátur ‘house-boat’.
b. Genitive compounds, where the first part seems to consist of an inflected (i.e. genitive) form. Example vél-ar-hljóð ‘ machine-sound’.
c. Joined compounds, where the first and second part of the compound are bound together by a morpheme which does not seem to be (nor be derived from) any kind of inflectional ending. Example: ráð-u-nautur ‘advisor’.

It is often said that inflected first parts of compounds, as in (1b), are troublesome for any morphological theory. These compounds have been explained away, either by stating that this type of inflection is in some sense irregular and hence applies prior to compounding (see among others Sproat 1985) or that these compounds are in fact two words in a syntactic phrase that co-inflect (Di Sciullo and Williams 1987, Zwanenburg 1990). One very common type of genitive compounds in Icelandic is of special theoretical interest here because neither of these explanations can account for it. It has strong semantical and formal relations to syntactic phrases with genitive complements.

This type of compounding is very productive and the first part of such compounds is identical to the genitive form of the corresponding word. The theoretically and descriptively interesting questions discussed in this paper include the following:

(2)
a. Where (i.e. “where” in the grammar) and how are compounds in Icelandic formed?
b. Does compounding in Icelandic provide evidence for the claim that some morphological processes take place “in the syntax”?

The findings presented here point to the following: Stem compounds are formed in the lexicon prior to inflection. That explains why their first part is uninflected. On the other hand, some genitive compounds, namely those with clear formal and semantic relations to syntactic phrases with genitive complements, are derived in the syntax (i.e. from such syntactic phrases). Thus the compound vél-ar-hljóð ‘machine sound’ is formed from the phrase hljóð vél-ar ‘sound of a machine’. Hence the inflectional ending of the first part of the compound. This kind of compounding involves two stages: inversion of the noun and the genitive complement: hljóð vél-ar > vél-ar hljóð, and then merger of the two parts of the noun phrase into a single compound: vél-ar-hljóð.

Not all genitive compounds in Icelandic are explainable in terms of “morphology in the syntax” since there is no clear semantic relationship between some genitive compounds and corresponding phrases with genitive complements (and in some cases no such phrases can even be formed). Such compounds can be accounted for in very much the same fashion as similar compounds in other languages, namely bey saying that they have been lexicalized and the „genitive ending“ of the first part has developed the role of a linking elements. Such elements are used either for phonotactic reasons or to indicate the structure of complex words, or both. Such compounds also occur in Norwegian, for instance. This type is interesting and deserves further research.